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 government gets ever bigger in various parts of the world, one sign of this is how many signs there are. In the USA, as I discovered over the past two weeks, it is now increasingly common to see signs telling you all about how to prevent death by choking.
That’s right. Apparently, I understand that it is now a bylaw in many states to require owners of restaurants and bars to put up signs showing folk how to avoid death by choking on food, and how to assist someone who may be in trouble. The notices seem to be very detailed. What on earth is going on? Have there been a large number of folk keeling over after choking on a pretzel, as nearly happened to President Bush about a year ago?
That our political and health-conscious masters want to help us to avoid death – so they say – is hardly new. It is also pretty difficult to get indignant about putting up a poster giving handy hints on how to avoid death. It caused me a certain amount of wry amusement, although other state infractions of property rights, such as bans on smoking in privately owned bars, are far less amusing.
(Bars in New York are not quite the smelly places of old, but seemed to be less full than the last time I was in town).
Back here in Britain, though, it seems the country has a bad case of “sign overload”, as Rod Liddle describes here in the Spectator. He argues, rightly, that any place which carries lots of signs telling us not to hit the staff or behave like a thug is precisely the sort of place to avoid. It is now routine for London Underground stations, railway stations and hospital waiting rooms to have signs warning us not to be rude to staff and to refrain from beating them up.
In a healthy civil society where moral standards are ‘internalised’ and tacitly accepted, it is not necessary to state what ought to be blindingly obvious to the average man or woman. Telling folk with signs to behave decently is a reflection of how infantilised our society has become, and tells us everything about the mindset of those who run what are laughably called our “public services”. It is a lame admission that once-widely accepted standards of conduct are no longer part of the common stock of human knowledge, but have to be spelled out as if explaining maths to a five-year-old for the first time.
Of course there are many factors to explain this tendency. That great vehicle of moral hazard, known as the Welfare State, has a lot to do with erosion of behaviours, but it is by no means the only reason. Some may cite the decline in religious belief, although it is by no means clear to this atheist that belief in a Supreme Being is necessary to avoid society collapsing into some sort of Hobbesian chaos.
Is it too much to hope that if we treat our fellows like adults, that they will behave accordingly? Perhaps I am an incurable optimist.
(As a side-observation, I have noted that whenever the announcer on the London Underground tells us to “mind the gap” between the train and the platform, it produces howls of mirth from foreigners. I think they imagine it is some sort of strange national ritual, like tea, Wimbledon fortnight or the Proms).
I will be the first person to admit I do not greatly enjoy driving a car and trying to map read at the same time. I am one of those folk who get on a lot better in a strange place when I have a passenger with the intelligence to give me decent directions. So one of the great boons of technology for a chap like me has been the developing use of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) navigation technology.
I have just returned from a terrific holiday in the USA. During the first week – staying at the northern California home of long-time pal and libertarian blogger Russell Whitaker – I rented a nice big saloon complete with GPS. It was a Magellan device and in my opinion, worth every cent. You can choose from a menu of different languages and the machine either enables you to take the fastest route home, or the most scenic, as well as pinpointing interesting places to visit. On balance I estimate I saved several hours that would have been otherwise spent trying to use a map. On only about three occasions did I get lost. In one case the GPS was wrong footed by a roadwork, and in another by a bad traffic jam. (And er, human error is not removed by GPS). But on the whole, my message to anyone who wants to avoid getting lost is to get GPS.
GPS is now widely used, not just by motorists but also by hikers, bikers, yachtsmen and powerboat users, as well as by the armed forces. GPS started out as part of the US Defence Dept’s satellite system to make it easier for America’s military to identify and hit targets. This point will of course be mentioned by those who want to argue that GPS would never exist without Big Government backing. However, given that launch costs can be radically reduced if only we let that happen – as suggested by the CATO Institute, it seems to me implausible to argue that a system like GPS can only get under way in the State sector. It strikes me as entirely plausible to imagine a rich businessman like Bill Gates, say, launching a few satellites and creating a luxury product of GPS that could eventually drop radically in price while also extending its range. GPS, like other breakthrough technologies, could have started as a high-end luxury good and gradually expand in scope and fall in cost like pocket calculators, DVD machines or jet travel.
There are also civil liberties issues to do with the government use of GPS, and I recommend that it is probably not a good idea for users to programme their individual street address into rented GPS machines if they can avoid it. And also do not imagine that this technology renders older methods redundant. For example, any yachtsman who puts to sea without the right charts, compasses and knowledge of navigation is asking for trouble. Oh, and remember that handheld GPS machines run on batteries, which run out.
Okay, anyone want to buy me a machine for Christmas?
A smart and thought-provoking blogger I have recently come across, Perry Metzger, who seems to hail from the anarcho-capitalist bit of the libertarian intellectual universe, does not like the way this blog has supported the military ouster of Saddam Hussein. Now, of course another certain Perry (de Havilland) of this parish thinks rather differently.
Metzger asks how it is that folk who are so ardently opposed to the State can possibly countenance the use of force, including appropriation of wealth via taxation, to topple another regime deemed to be dangerous. Well, it is actually quite easy to answer that question in my view. First of all, not all libertarians believe a free society can exist without a minimal state, including one with the ability to provide external and internal security, which may include the need to take out violent and hostile foreign regimes.
Second, the supposedly sacred libertarian principle that thou shalt not initiate force against another is not very useful when it comes to judging whether regime X or Y poses your country a particular threat or not, and whether action of a Bush-style pre-emptive sort is justified and perhaps even more important, whether it is prudent. Good people will and do differ a lot about that.
Such disagreements cannot in my view be arbitrated solely by referring to abstract moral principles – although principles are of course crucial – but have to be also judged on events, by weighing up the possible consequences of an action or taking no action. In fact, taking no action and adopting a purely reactive approach to defence will also have consequences, not all of them necessarily good ones. There is no easy way to say which approach will always be better. So even two ardent libertarians who read a situation in the Middle East, say, could differ on fine points and end up having precisely the sort of heated debates we get in the comments sections.
I have changed my mind on so many aspects of the current war in Iraq that my head will probably explode at some point. At one point I felt the whole affair was a dumb mistake and we would have been better off leaving Saddam in his palaces and let things run on awhile. But regardless of what I thought about facts on the ground and the news reports I read, I honestly do not feel that appeals to higher tenets of libertarian theory really ever decisively swayed my mind about the particulars one way or the other.
I have not really managed to develop much of an interest in the Olympic Games currently underway in Greece. I am watching the television right now. A bunch of Greek ‘fans’ are objecting to some US athletes for reasons I cannot quite seem to understand, judging by the less than helpful BBC commentator team.
The Games are not supposed to be about nationalism, and yet the constant focus seems to be on how many of ‘our’ (British) athletes have won how many gold, silver and bronze medals. When the Games are completed, there will be the usual bleating/gloating over how well ‘our’ men and women did. If ‘we’ do badly, be ready and primed for a great wailing about the unsportiness, unfitness, lack of moral fibre blah blah of young British folk.
It is easy to forget that the Olympics were originally envisioned as celebrating the value of individual achievement and struggle over nationalistic competition. I think it is fair to say that this hope has been well and truly thwarted.
The one thing I know government is good for is countervailing against monopoly. It’s not great at that either, but it is the only force I know that is fairly reliable. But if you’ve got a truly free market you only have a free market for a while before it becomes completely regulated by those aspects of it that have employed power laws to gain a complete monopoly.
The above paragraph appears in the latest edition of libertarian magazine Reason, one of the best and most thought-provoking mags out there in my opinion. The quote is taken from John Perry Barlow, veteran campaigner for civil liberties issues, scourge of government attempts to invade privacy, and a writer of lyrics for none other than the Grateful Dead.
And yet the above quotation is to my mind a piece of economic illiteracy so bad that I was rather surprised that the Reason interviewer, Brian Doherty, let him get away with his assertion about the free market so easily. However, where Reason failed, Samizdata can step in.
First off, when Barlow talks of ‘power laws’, what exactly does he mean? If he means stuff like draconian copyright laws, or licencing privileges to shaft potential competitors, then surely such things are the creation of governments and not a feature of a ‘free market’! Most of the restrictions on competition which bar entrepreneurs from entering a field were created by governments in response to business lobbying. That is clearly a bad thing, but it is weird for Barlow to suggest that the remedy to such abuse of power is to ‘re-regulate’ the market to somehow make it freer. The solution to the problem is surely to cut the state down to size so that it cannot disburse such corporate welfare privileges to vested interests in the first place.
In holding this view, Barlow makes the classic mistake of so many folk who think they have discovered a fatal flaw in capitalism in that some sectors of an economy get to be dominated by one or two major businesses such as Microsoft or the aluminium firm Alcoa. “Monopoly!”, they cry, before demanding anti-trust style laws to break up businesses into smaller, supposedly more ‘perfectly’ competing bits. (Yes, I know Microsoft’s particular circumstances are open to many legitimate attacks – I am not an apologist for them, in case commenters bring this up). This view is based on the failure to grasp that just because a firm has X percent of a market share and is very big, it is therefore somehow able to coerce folk into buying its products. However inconvenient it may be for me to avoid using the products of Bill Gates, say, I can do so. Microsoft or General Motors do not force me to buy their services at the point of a gun.
Another mistake linked to this confusion about monopoly is the failure to see that competition is not a state of affairs desirable for its own sake, but rather a dynamic process in which economic actors like businessmen are trying to figure out new and better ways to satisfy demands and also to come up with goods and services previously unthought of. At any one freeze-frame of an economy, there will be big, mature businesses fighting to hold their ground and operating on thin profit margins; medium-scale firms still posting sharp growth, and embryonic small fry waiting to burst into the scene. If a big firm with a large market share takes its eye off the ball for a second, it quickly can be overtaken by a previously unkown upstart, as indeed happened to IBM and other firms once thought to be invincible by critics like Barlow.
Big businesses are often the worst defenders of free markets, and are often only too keen on spending millions of their shareholders’ money in lobbying for tariffs and other cushy deals from the State. But to expect the State, given its terrible track record, to make the market more “free” is one of the dumbest delusions there is.
Addendum: Thomas Sowell’s excellent Basic Economics is a good place to clear up the sort of economic fallacies such as Barlow’s.
During a very pleasant week in the island of Malta, I took a fair old mix of books to read while catching some rays on the beach. Among the books I had been meaning, out of curiousity. to read was Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. (A sort of upmarket version of Confessions of a Bored French Housewife). I read the novel in about three days and I can say that the book is one of the most overated pieces of crud it has been my misfortune to read for a long time. I have read a fair amount of famous French literature in my time (I love Dumas and Hugo) but this was poor.
I can see why the book appeals to a certain kind of reader. While it tilts at the vital issue of women’s liberation and the dangers of destructive relationships, it is in fact also deeply cynical and negative. It maintains a sustained sneer at a whole way of being for about 290 pages. While obsessed about the “hypocrisy” of 19th Century social mores, it utterly fails to suggest how a more “honest” value system would work. (Never mind the old adage that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue).
At times there is almost Woody Allenish message jumping from the page: “Life sucks and then you die”. It is also hugely conceited and snobbish about ordinary, middle class people. (Flaubert prided himself on not performing any productive work in his life). It set the precedent for a whole range of books and plays mocking the middle class and supposed stuffy convention. However, unlike the wonderful short stories of Saki or the plays of Osar Wilde, Flaubert is rarely funny.
Why worry now about a book by a diseased Frenchman penned 150 years ago? Well, as this fine short article by Anthony Daniels makes clear, we have been paying the price for sneering at the bourgois value system almost as soon as the word “bourgois” became part of our verbal lexicon. The greatest victims, invariably, are the poor and ill educated.
I have just returned back to London from a business trip to Edinburgh, now in the full swing of its major arts festival, when thousands of theatrical, comic and music acts strut their stuff. I was up in that fine city on more prosaic financial matters and although the weather was fairly dire for August – it rained all the time – I had an enjoyable trip and learned a lot more about the city.
First off, Edinburgh remains a serious financial centre. Quite a few traditionally London-based investment managers and financiers have happily turned their backs on the costs, noise and hassles of life in London in favour of Edinburgh. From the point of view of ‘quality of life’, the city has a lot to commend it. Commuting to work is much easier than in London, just for starters.
In the course of interviewing a CEO of a large investment firm, however, I was startled to be told that the top employer in the city is the local council. That’s right. The biggest source of jobs in the place is not a big fund manager, bank, IT firm or some other business, but the local municipality.
Therein lies the problem of modern Scotland, as far as I can see. Socialism has alas taken a deep hold of its public political culture at least as far as I can tell. The land of Adam Smith and David Hume seems to have forgotten some of the virtues of small government and red-blooded capitalism, as this article over at the blog Freedom and Whiskey makes clear I truly hope this changes in the future. And if it ever does, then other financial capitals of Europe could be in for some very tough competition indeed. Edinburgh could become a very pleasant and exciting place to work and is certainly becoming much easier to reach, as developments to its airport go forward.
Well, that’s all from me for a while. Off on holiday. See you later.
The British passport service is demanding that folk no longer are allowed to smile sweetly for the camera when it comes to having a passport photo taken. Apparently, if you show your gleaming grin on a passport picture it messes up the face recognition systems being introduced into airports and other places.
So in other words, it is now official policy for British citizens to look miserable. Marvellous. So now the cliche about we Brits being a nation of gloomy folk is now to receive the official sanction of the State. Does this mean our grinning Prime Minister will be similarly affected? Is it now considered un-PC and unpatriotic to look cheerful and happy?
Of course, this reminds me of the old joke: If you resemble a passport picture, it is time you took a holiday. (Which reminds me – I am off to Malta and outa here in a week for some much-needed R&R!).
Some time ago, Michael Jennings of this parish caused a stir by suggesting a way of subverting the leftist intent of the staff who decide what sort of books they recommend to customers at Britain’s high street bookstores. While strictly against the rules of property, I totally sympathised with Michael’s intent and his annoyance that the bookstore seemed to be run this way.
It has not got any better in the bookshop world, as far as I can tell (at least not in Britain. Things may be different elsewhere). Earlier this week I spent a quick lunchbreak wandering around the nearby Books Etc. store in Holborn High Street. After browsing through a fairly sparsely-stocked crime and general fiction section, I took a peek at the current affairs and history section. The history bit was okay, if not particularly impressive. But the current affairs section was in a different class. It might have been stocked by the sort of folk who write for the Democratic Underground or who think Michael Moore is a sort of latter-day saint. Books by Chomsky, Gore Vidal, John Gray (a pet hate of mine); Michael Moore, of course; then various authors I have not heard of before but the titles give the general gist: “George W. Bush and the Arrogance of Power”; Why Do People Hate America?”, and blah, blah, blah. Apart from one slim volume by noted scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis, it was a total washout.
Now what is going on here? Clearly, the folk who decide what books to sell and what books to publish presumably want to make money. I tentatively offer a few explanations: the impact of higher education and direct bias from bookstore staff. Dealing with the latter point first, I have found, while chatting to the folk who work in the stores, that most tilt to the statist left. Maybe they directly get to decide what is put up in certain parts of the store. With popular fiction, they have to stock Harry Potter and Nick Hornby like everyone else, but when it comes to politics, they get freer rein. That is my take anyhow.
But I also believe higher education has an effect on all this. The serious, non-fiction parts of bookstores cater for a perceived ‘high-brow’ market. Given that humanities departments, such as political and history ones, tend to tilt to the left in my experience, it follows that the main market for such books will tend to shift the same way. There is not – yet – a big market for non-fiction with a clear libertarian and conservative leaning.
In the Internet Age, of course, this may not matter so much. But as a bibliophile it bugs me to see the biggest high street bookshops stocking so much crud.
One of Spain’s top banks, Santander, is making a bid to buy the British banking firm Abbey plc, the mortgage lending firm which used to be a building society (what Americans would know as a Savings and Loan).
I do not have much to say about the specifics of the deal. It is all a part of the merger, acquision and disposal process which is a healthy part of capitalism and the efficient allocation of scarce capital. Maybe the shareholders of either firm have strong views on the matter but I do not. However, what is interesting to me is what this deal says about Spain’s development as an economic power.
Spain is one of the success stories of the past few years. When I went to the glorious city of Barcelona last year I was struck by how prosperous and dynamic the place was. I hear and read similar impressions from other sources. Much of this has to do with the determination of Spanish entrepreneurs to throw off the shackles of former failed socialist policies and embrace a more liberal economic culture, which former centre-right premier Aznar helped spawn. Let us hope the new socialist government elected earlier this year in rather shameful circumstances after the Madrid bombings does not mess it up.
It would be a grave error to infer too much from the acquisitive activities of a Spanish bank in Britain. But I get the feeling that this grand old nation is flexing its economic muscles again, and who knows, making a distinct improvement to the quality of Britain’s economy while getting richer as well. Good. It feels appropriate somehow. There are hundreds of thousands of British expatriates living in Spain so it perhaps fitting that Spain’s biggest companies are trying to get a piece of the action in the UK.
(As an aside, I would like to know what the Spanish-based blog Iberian Notes makes of this).
As many will have read by now, the British government has made substantial cuts to parts of the country’s armed forces, such as disbanding Royal Air Force Squadrons, cutting frigates, and reducing headcount across the board. As I would have guessed, this has prompted a lot of criticism from various quarters and no doubt some, if not all of it, is justified.
However, rather than get into fine details of whether Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon is a strategic genius, sensible manager or weak fool (I report, you decide), I want to pose the question as to what sort of armed forces a libertarian-leaning government ought to have in place. (Use of mercenaries, perhaps?). Well, given that the first responsibility of any government is defence of the realm against attack, it is at least debateable whether an island nation like Britain requires, for example, a big army, an extensive airforce, or even a large navy with lots of aircraft carriers, and so on. So one could argue that the kind of armed forces envisaged by Blair’s government might be appropriate for one restricted to a self defence role. (In reality I expect commenters to point out the many flaws in these plans. Please do).
However what is obviously strange about the timing and nature of the cuts is that they come from a government not exactly shy of projecting force overseas for its liberal internationalist ends. For example, at times Blair’s position on Iraq has been more to do with overthrowing thuggish regimes that attract his scorn rather than do so on the basis of Britain’s long-term self defence needs. Such a view surely requires rather a big army, navy and air force. It also makes me wonder whether Britain any more has the ability to act as an independent military power in any meaningful sense. I doubt it. A friend of mine who has recently left the RAF says it is almost unthinkable that a Falkland Islands operation would be possible with today’s force levels. Others I know who have served in the military tell me the same thing.
There is also, one final long-term worry that I have. These cuts will further deter bright and capable young men and women from seeking a career in our forces, which require ever-higher levels of technical know-how while also drawing on the permanent need for courage and endurance. The message from these defence cuts is hardly going to get young folk to think about a career. I dreamed once of following my father into the RAF as a flyer. Now I am glad I did not. A shame. I’d have looked pretty nifty in that flying suit.
I do not imagine that Samizdata readers spend a lot of their spare time reading Arena magazine (it does not appear to be available online). It is a chap’s monthly publication that fancies itself as being at the more intelligent end of the man’s magazine world, mixing glossy advertisements for insanely expensive wristwatches and fast cars, not to mention pictures of minor French actresses in a pleasing state of undress, with post-modernist ironic pieces on anger management, etc. I get the impression that it is the sort of publication that pitches to the sort of man who reads the Guardian or Observer but who wants to indulge his blokeish tendencies with a clean conscience – in short, to have his low-fat steak and eat it.
Occasionally the tension shows. In the August edition, for instance, we have a largely gushing and Bush-bashing film review of the latest Michael Moore propaganda effort, sorry, ‘documentary’, Fahrenheit 9/11, which contains a remarkable admission by the obviously pro-Moore reviewer that the filmaker had a “cavalier attitude to such niceties as facts” while stating what a swell film it is. Facts eh, who gives a damn about em?
But what really did it for me was an article (page 77) containing one of the nastiest attacks on a group of people in a magazine that I have read for some time: the overweight. The writer, Giles Coren, whom I have heard of before, rants against overweight people in terms of amazing verbal violence. Words such as “mountain-arsed”, “the great lumps”, “these pigs”, etc, are sprinkled around. Witty, no?
Now I accept that there is something dumb about those who are overweight trying to present themselves as victims. However, I also have nothing but contempt for the way in which the fast-food industry has been targeted for assault by an unsavoury mixture of ambulance-chasing lawyers, moral scolds and sundry bores who would legislate our pleasures out of existence rather than rely on our own self-restraint and personal responsibility. Coren’s article, in particular, seems to be steeped in a sort of fashionable puritanism and also draws on a deeply suppressed need to be able to hate a particular group. Let’s face it, hatred is out of style. There are laws against it. If our demented British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gets his way, it will not be possible to express anything more than polite scepticism about the irrational superstitions known as official religions. But humans love to hate, or at least some of them do.
I very much fear that the overweight among us are in the cross-hairs of our fashionable haters. Of course, one should not make too much from a single article in a pretentious guy’s magazine, but Coren’s piece is all part of a trend.
To hell with him, I am sending out for pizza with extra cheese.
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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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