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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A commenter to this blog has dismissed the recent achievements of Bert Rutan’s Spaceship One flight as being a waste of money, money which the commenter believes should not have been ‘wasted’ on such a venture and devoted to causes the said commenter no doubt deems a worthier object. We have been here before with this sort of criticism, of course with the Moon landings, with the rather obvious difference that the Apollo missions relied on taxpayers’ money, and not funds provided voluntarily by businessmen.
More generally, any innovative endeavour, or venture which may yield benefits not immediately graspable, can be dismissed and attacked as wasteful. The trial and errors of capitalism were dismissed by early socialist thinkers as wasteful, in contrast to their dreams of an efficient, centrally planned order. We know better now, of course. It hardly needs to be pointed out that on that logic, the first man who discovered how to make fire and spent hours chipping flints to make arrowheads was ‘wasting time’ in the eyes of his fellow cavedwellers, who no doubt wondered if he should be doing something more important.
And I am sure I speak for my fellow Samizdata contributors in hailing the excellent and sustained coverage by Dale Amon of the latest space flight ventures. It is a positive and exhilarating development and frankly, a tonic at a time of so much depressing news out there. So my message to the Luddites who carp, is simply this – you ain’t seen nothing yet.
We recently marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of the 19th century free trade reformer, classical liberal and ardent anti-interventionist politician, Richard Cobden. Cobden rose from conditions of poverty that would have crushed lesser spirits to become one of the greatest advocates of laissez faire capitalism and globalisation to have ever lived. Along with fellow liberal John Bright, Cobden created the anti-Corn Law League, one of the most successful pressure groups in British history. The Corn Law protectionist measures were eventually swept away by Tory Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1846, helping to set the stage for the mid-century industrial boom. (Peel is also one of my few historical political heroes). Cobden opposed protectionism and explained the benefits of free trade with a passion and energy that puts our timid politicians of today to shame.
So it was rather fitting to have just spent a most enjoyable evening listening to live jazz and sipping champagne in one of London’s oldest private member clubs, known as The Cobden Club. Located near the Paddington area of west London, and founded as a working man’s club in the Victorian age, it has now morphed into a comfortable bar and restaurant complete with a separate dance floor for those inclined. I like the way that the Victorian architecture has been retained, with wonderful tall ceilings and fittings, combined with plenty of modern touches and colourful prints on the walls. The atmosphere is very ‘chilled out’ and relaxing. I love its big comfy armchairs into which you can sink while sipping a coffee or brandy in the company of friends. It is also unpretentious and lacks the stuffy atmosphere one finds in some of the clubs around Mayfair, for example.
I like to think that the spirit of the great man would have smiled at the thought of a Samizdata blogger carousing in the club that bore his name, since I very much doubt whether 90 percent of its clientele have ever heard of Richard Cobden, and his standing as a magnificent advocate of classical liberalism.
So far, I have not been all that enthused by the Euro 2004 European Championship football tournament being held in Portugal at the moment but finally, it appears, the sporting event has sparked into life. This evening, Croatia came close to beating the former champions France, in a thrilling game. Earlier in the day, England, who lost their first game in the last minutes to France, managed after some hiccups to overwhelm Switzerland.
All to the good. I must say that watching some of the matches has reminded me of why, despite my annoyance at the antics of highly paid sportsmen, I still love watching football, and why I despise those who think it is amusing to sneer at we plebs and our love of what Brazil’s Pele called the “Beautiful Game”.
Take this piece of drivel from an anti-sports snob, for instance:
The players are even more loathesome than the fans. All professional sportsmen are more or less imbeciles, of course, but only footballers manage to be so utterly charmless with it. They are essentially overgrown spoilt children, diving and rolling around pretending to be injured, and practically wetting themselves whenever someone scores. There is a general, and sometimes quite fantastic, ugliness. If I had my way, I would have them all shot.
I wonder if the author of this piece would like to pass on his profound thoughts to one of the England team? Seriously though, for all that I despise the moronic behaviour of certain England football “fans” causing mayhem, I also despise a certain kind of anti-sport snob who imagines he or she is being terribly daring and original by sneering at the pleasures of the ordinary guy and his enthusiasm for team sports.
Oh well, come on England!
Ronald Reagan was, as we know, dubbed among other things as “The Great Communicator”. Through his speeches, radio broadcasts and writings, Reagan had a wonderful knack of communicating important truths in clear-cut ways.
What intrigues me is wondering what he would have made of this new field of blogging. I reckon he would have loved it and could easily imagine the old fella writing one. As a talk-radio host, he had a lot to say that would have fitted in perfectly with the weblog format. I have recently been reading a collection of his radio show broadcast transcripts and it blasts the idea of him being a dope. Anything but, in fact.
Reagan was eager to make full use of the modern technologies of his time in spreading his views about the role of government, capitalism, the evils of communism and the like. I don’t think it impertinent to imagine that this great man would have loved our medium and enjoyed the fact of its challenge to Big Media. I wonder what he’d have called his weblog. How about “Shining City on a Hill”?
I am watching a television show on Channel 4 at the moment about how an English couple fare in foresaking the home comforts and routine of life in Essex for the risk-taking venture of running a sailing school in the Canary Islands. As a keen yachtsman myself, I identified quite a lot with the guy who became fed up with a routine day job and dreamed of making a living in the sun. This television show, called No Going Back, has featured a number of couples, mostly young, who have emigrated in the search for a dream job.
In many cases, the people selected for the shows chose to go overseas either because they were bored with life in Britain, fed up with their jobs, their neighourhood, and tempted by the glossy magazine images of life abroad. But the programme makers never directly asked any of them if other factors drove them abroad, such as rising domestic taxes and regulations on business, or the rising level of crime and sliding quality of schooling for their children. Maybe this sort of stuff was considered a bit too political in what are essentially ‘fly on the wall’ documentaries about ordinary folk striving after a dream.
What is clear, more broadly, is that a lot of my fellow Britons have had enough of life in this damp little island off the European continent and want out. Some of the issues I mentioned in the previous paragraph have something to do with it. There have in the past, and indeed now, been examples of some of Britain’s best scientists and entrepreneurs leaving the UK for friendlier and more lucrative places abroad. There is also the simple fact that Britain is so densely populated. It is hard to convey to those who have never been here and who live in big nations just how crowded the UK is, particularly in the economically vibrant bits, such as London and the southeast.
I would love to go and work abroad, if only to savour the experience of living in another land and broadening my horizons. I would, however, like to think that I take such a step for the positive reasons of spreading my wings, rather than because I have been pushed to despair by the state of this nation.
Of course, in years to come, Channel 4 may be screening a show about how a young couple from Essex packed up their belongings and decided to ‘start over’ in the recently terraformed Mars.
Well, anyone reading the latest headlines will have realised by now that the price of oil, and hence petrol, is zooming higher, following the latest violence in the Middle East, in this case, the attacks on western oil workers in Saudi Arabia over the weekend. The price of Brent crude passed through the $42 per barrel level by the time I had switched off my price feeds in my City offices, and for all I can guess, it could go higher still.
In the near term, all this is bound to trigger a number of responses from politicians and certain quarters of the commentariat. We need a “Integrated Energy Strategy”, drastic cuts to petrol taxes, etc, etc. (It has already started, judging by the stuff beamed into the television channels which I can watch while burning off some decidedly non-oil calories in the gym).
Well, it is good to know that that the chaotic and unplanned world we know and love as entrepreneurial capitalism is already cranking out possible solutions to present and future energy needs, whether it involves biomass, solar energy, hydrogen fuel cells, and other technologies. The venture capital industry, still recovering from the fading of the dotcom boom, may gain a new life from energy projects of the sort sketched out in Wired magazine. Longer term, things such as nanotechnology and continuing developments in materials sciences could help us make lighter, and hence much more energy-efficient cars and better insulated homes and workplaces.
All to the good. The prospect of entrepreneurial solutions would be even brighter were it not for the current Western angst about nuclear fission and fusion power, given that it may be possible in future to build nuclear plants at much cheaper cost than at present and perhaps deal far more effectively with some of the waste problems that have proven so ticklish in the past (side observation – there are obvious security issues to do with nuclear waste in the current geo-political situation).
Overall, however, it would be well to remember – not that readers need reminding, surely – that a high price for X may be a serious bug for some, but a raging opportunity for others. I’d wager that a lot of the calmer economists and analysts out there are poring over the possibilities that exist in the energy sector and related R&D. We could be in for a rough economic ride, but surely, if the price of petrol keeps rising, the market surely offers a better bet for figuring out some kind of solutions that anything we are likely to see from our political masters.
And at the risk of pulling the chains of some of this blog’s most loyal readers, it may also mean sales of SUVs will decline and folk, not just in the United States, will have to turn to smaller, and in my ‘umble opinion, aesthetically nicer forms of automobile instead. But fear not, the current situation won’t stop me blogging about the latest hot bit of stuff to come out of the Ferrari factory. Oh no.
It is by now a familiar statement from anti-war folk that Saddam had no real links to Islamic terror groups of any consequence. The idea, dear boy, is totally incredible. The man, who after all was a “secular ruler” (conjuring up the image of the old bastard reading Voltaire of an evening). had a positive revulsion of Islamic religious extremism. To suggest a link is to fall prey to the fantasies of the great neoconservative/Zionist/whatever conspiracy now trying to rule the world. Right?
Well, no, actually. The Wall Street Journal has an article today setting out what it believes is rather a big lump of evidence pointing to terror links before and after 9/11:
One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam’s son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime’s dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda “summit” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.
Okay, I know what the responses will be. It’s the Wall Street Journal! You can’t believe these guys! etc, etc.
But stepping aside from this specific article, consider this following general scenario: you have a military dictator who loves taking his nation to the brink even at great cost; his military forces are seriously damaged from two devastating wars and a sanctions regime; he craves revenge and enjoys humiliating his foes. To whom does he turn to help hurt his great enemy, the United States?
Exactly. Why is it so crazy, so bonkers, to think that terror links probably did exist, and that, if it were possible, it was vital for the intelligence services of the Western powers to check those possibilities?
You may say, why does this really matter now? Well, to be frank, the argument that we need to “reshape the Middle East” always struck me as dangerously ambitious, and the costs of such a venture struck me as potentially prohibitive. That is one part of the isolationist position I have some sympathy for, a fact which might surprise some. (“Johnathan Pearce has gone wobbly!”) For me, though, what counted was the potentially deadly nexus of terror groups, mass weapons, and rogue states able and willing to offer harbour and support to such terror groups. My conscience is troubled at the thought that we might have attacked a nation of no serious threat to us. Well, if the latest stories turn out to be even half-true, then the evidence of Saddam’s malignity just got a lot, lot harder.
One of the craziest, loudest, most adrenalin-charged race events in the planet is held every year in Reno, in the United States, in the middle of September.
Cars? Nope. Horses? Nope. What you get are hundreds of aircraft, ranging from pre-WW2 biplanes through to modern jets, but for me, the absolute stars of the show are the souped-up Second World War fighters, especially my favourite, the mighty P-51 Mustang. These planes are now owned by mega-rich race enthusiasts who fly around a great circuit in the sky. Well, about 50 feet above terra firma, actually.
I once watched Samizdata television favourite Jeremy Clarkson present an entertaining show about the Reno Air Race, and have wanted to trek up to Lake Tahoe and enjoy the sights of this air race ever since. Well, this year, yours truly and his fair girlfriend will be there. I can hardly wait.
And if anyone reading this is going to be in the vicinity of Reno between September 16 and 19, and would like to meet up, please let me know via the e-mail address in the sidebar.
Sean Gabb, who has been involved in libertarian circles for many years, will be well known to many readers of this blog. His personal website and his Free Life Commentary are always a cracking good read, even if one disagrees with some of what he says. Sean has never allowed his fierce passions thus far to break elementary good manners, as far as I can tell, until now.
Mr Gabb opposes the Coalition powers’ overthrow of Saddam and his regime, which he deemed as essentially harmless to Britain and the West, and considers the venture of seeking to transform that injured nation into some form of pluralist, liberal haven to be an act of folly. The plight of the people living in Iraq under Saddam, while obviously awful, was not deemed by Sean to be reason for overthrowing Saddam’s vile rule. Fair enough. A lot of people whom I hold in esteem share that view – mistaken though I think such ‘realists’ to be. But by now the arguments on both sides are well known and I will not go into them again.
What I really dislike about so much anti-war commentary to date has been in many cases its pompous anti-Americanism, a sort of drawn-out sneer. The likes of Times journalist Matthew Parris and Sir Max Hastings are particularly egregious sinners in this respect. Well, in his latest commentary, Mr Gabb comes out with a paragraph of breathtaking rudeness at the expense of Americans and their country, of the sort that might possibly give even those gentlemen a moments pause:
It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people. But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating a great nation as they went. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power and the moral insight of a tree frog.
The reference to ‘paupers’ who ‘never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority’ is particularly vile. Some of the people who have made their home in the relative freedom and prosperity of America did so by successfully fleeing despotisms similar to Iraq.
I have known Sean for such a long time and enjoyed talking to him down the years that it would seem churlish to get too outraged at something like this. But it would be dishonest of me not to record my disgust at what was a particularly oafish piece of writing, all the less forgiveable for coming from one of the finest writers I know.
Over at the excellent libertarian group weblog, Cattalarchy, there is a fine and thoughtful collection of articles, which was published a few days ago, to mark the May Day parades of old socialists with a wide-ranging broadside against what communism has wrought. I urge folk to fire up some coffee and take time out to read them all.
With all that fine material in mind, I was stunned to read a screed in the latest edition of The Spectator by ultra-rightwinger Peter Hitchens. As well as saying some decidedly uncomplimentary things about former South African President and anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela, a topic to which I may return later, Hitchens also bemoans what he claims has been the lack of any real improvement of life in countries which have been released from communism.
Really? Have there been no improvements at all? I mean, for a start, surely a declared Christian like Hitchens should be glad that fellow believers are no longer persecuted as they were in the old days of Communism. The Gulag is no longer in operation. Members of the KGB no longer drag you off in the middle of the night. And yes, key parts of the economies of those nations are not just recovering, but offering some of the tastiest investment opportunities in the world today, as this article illustrates.
There is a priceless passage in which Hitchens even refers to the elderly generation in the former Eastern bloc who miss the good old days of guaranteed jobs, even if that era came with bread queues, bureaucracy and compulsory military service. That’s the spirit! None of this messy and vulgar capitalist nonsense, with all that bothersome choice, and ugly advertising, noisy department stores and red light districts.
I honestly do not know what to make of folk like Hitchens and whether he has any coherent political philosophy at all apart from a desire to shock what he thinks is the received wisdom (not always a bad or dishonourable urge, mind). A few weeks back he wrote a superb article shredding the case for state identity cards, of the kind that any libertarian would be proud to write. Yet a few issues later we get a gloomy piece almost pining the days when half of Europe was run by the communist empire of the Soviets.
Weird.
I am watching the BBC current affairs Newsnight. What a truly rich feast of stuff to look at. The main item was about the U.S. government’s response to the stories of atrocities by U.S. forces. Now I won’t go into the specifics but one point bugged me. It was the way in which the BBC presenter endlessly went on about the ‘Arab Street’.
Now, I no doubt imagine that the sort of persons who go on about the ‘Arab Street’ are sincere in imagining that all those who live in what is the Middle East are part of some common community, or ‘street’. But what is all too rarely pointed out is that this term in fact bands together tens of millions of very different individuals under one banner. It is a form of unthinking collectivism. The truth, of course, is that there is no such thing as an ‘Arab Street’, any more than there is a ‘Western Street’, ‘Asian Street’, or ‘North American Street’.
I hate to point out the blindingly obvious to collectivists on the Guardianista left and the isolationist right, but there are no ‘streets’ of this sort. The world is a tad more complex than that.
One of the brighter spots for the global economy in recent years has been China. A heady rate of economic growth – 9.7 percent growth in GDP last year – has encouraged some to wonder whether this nation’s decision to hitch its wagon to the star of capitalism can be translated into a more lasting adoption of liberal civil society. So far, the jury is out, but some signs are encouraging. I honestly cannot see how China can long resist reforms to its political arrangements in the long run.
More recently, though, a number of fund managers, banks and economists have voiced a few worries about whether China could be vulnerable to the sort of jarring market moves that hit Southeast Asia, starting in Thailand, back in the late 90s. China has a fixed exchange rate to the dollar, which means that at present Chinese goods are very cheap in overseas markets, but also swells the Chinese money supply. Credit expansion, guided by the state-owned banks, has been rapid, and a lot of the investment has been spent on questionable enterprises. About 40 percent or more of China’s GDP growth is dependent on bank lending. There are many signs that China could be headed for a serious hangover.
One of the biggest worries could be the state-run banks. About 40 percent of all the loans held by these banks are so-called non-performing loans — in other words, they will never be repaid. These banks are in the throes of a major overhaul, as the Chinese authorities in Beijing try to restructure the system along more commercial lines. But in the meantime, the authorities are trying to cut the pace of monetary growth, which may come at a time when the financial infrastructure is in a weak state.
Attending a conference in the City today, an economist, speaking off the record, said this: “Alan Greenspan (Fed Chairman) is a smart man, has access to all kinds of research backup, but he has made mistakes on the economy. Now the Chinese authorities, who are isolated in their Beijing centre, inexperienced in such matters, could make very big mistakes indeed.”
China offers a great deal of promise in the medium term. In the short term, anyone with a few pounds to spare on an investment should tread very carefully. China could be in for a bumpy ride.
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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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