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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It seems self-indulgent to regale readers of this blog with a personal gripe, but indulge me a moment. Like all too many Londoners, I usually have to take our Tube (subway) system to work. It is unpleasant. It is irregular. It is often extremely noisy and the air pollution is bad. In the summer months, it is incredibly hot (we Brits cannot figure out airconditioning without bleating about how vastly expensive it is). And it seems a cult of incompetence has gripped the organisation that runs it, like ivy creeping around the trunk of a tree.
This morning, on the Victoria line, all trains north and south were halted “owing to a signal failure in the Kings Cross area.” At least that is what I thought the announcer mumbled into the microphone, though the voice was so hushed and marked by embarrassed pauses that he or she could have been announcing something entirely different, such as last night’s football scores.
We gung-ho capitalists may hope that an injection of raw, competitive private enterprise will blast all this complacency and mule-headed uselessness away. Maybe. But sometimes I wonder whether if the country that built the first great railway network 150 or more years ago is capable of every again running big engineering projects with a modicum of talent.
Right, I’ll cheer up now.
I recently returned from an extremely relaxing weekend in the fine Spanish city of Barcelona with my girlfriend. I have fallen for the great Catalan metropolis, the home of the weird and wonderful architecture of Gaudi.
During a stroll around the old city centre, I came across one of the most astonishing shops I have ever seen. It was a shop selling just about every kind of sword, knife and gun. Samurai swords nestled among racks of old Winchester repeater rifles, copies of 15th century broadswords, cutlasses, calvalry sabres, hunting knives, old pistols. Amazing.
I do not speak Spanish very well, so I wasn’t able to discover from the shop owner as to what kind of laws exist in Spain regulating the sale of such weapons, but it was clear that laws in Spain are far, far more liberal than is the case in Britain. And on the basis of trips to other parts of Continental Europe, it would appear that the law is also more liberal than in the UK.
Why this is so is something on which I don’t have an easy answer. Spain is a country less infected, so it seems to me, by political correctness and the culture of ‘victimhood’. Whatever else you think of it as an activity, a country that embraces bullfighting as one of its most popular ‘sports’ clearly has not fallen under the rule of Guardianistas (although I find bullfighting pretty revolting).
We often slip into the comforting notion that we in the free Anglosphere are so much less regulated than our European peers, and in the realm of business and finance, this is true, on the whole. But let’s give credit where credit is due. It appears that in certain aspects of life, Europe is actually more liberal.
Oh, and the tapas tasted fantastic.
I am a skeptic of opinion polls but they have their uses. A recent poll suggests that Swedish voters are so far likely to say no to the single currency in the forthcoming referendum on whether Sweden should or should not sign up to The Project.
Notwithstanding the occasional wrinkle in official economic data, it seems pretty clear that the “core” nations of Euroland – Germany and France – are mired in economic difficulty and their labours are hardly likely to make it easier for the Swedish political elite to sell the euro to their electorate.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that the ongoing wrangle about whether UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and his government “sexed up” the dossier about Iraq WMDs has so damaged the public’s perception of Blair that a referendum on the euro looks farther away than ever.
Here’s hoping.
If I were a shareholder in Anglo American plc, the owner of de Beers, the world’s biggest diamond firm, I would be having a few sleepless nights over the cover story of Wired magazine, about a team of entrepreneurs working to produce artificial diamonds.
I am not a scientist, but this article makes it pretty clear that the technology to create high-quality gems is getting closer. Diamonds, of course, have all kinds of uses, not just in jewellery, but also in industrial applications such as in ultra-hard lathes, cutting equipment and so forth.
It also suggests that scientific advances are bringing us closer to enjoying all kinds of incredibly light and strong materials, of a sort that are bound to be useful for activities such as aerospace, space travel, construction, and possibly also for the military.
This is another welcome reminder that despite the daily news of political dishonesty, terror bombings and the antics of dysfunctional celebs, smart folk out there are hard at work producing all kinds of new and amazing stuff.
I have been reading a remarkable book about a remarkable period in British history – the mid- to late 18th century – when a group of entrepreneurs, gifted amateur scientists and political radicals helped create the foundations of much of our modern industrial world.
The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, looks at the lives of a small but amazingly influential group of men, particularly the ceramics genius Josiah Wedgewood, pamphleteer and scientist Joseph Priestley, engineer Matthew Boulton, steam engine king James Watt, and medical doctor Erasmus Darwin. What jumps off the page is these men’s tremendous sense of drive and enthusiasm for acquiring and sharing knowledge. They were great polymaths, seeing no division between the pursuit of abstract knowledge and practical concerns of money making.
Most of these men were consciously outsiders, eccentrics and radicals ill at ease with the Anglican establishment. That sense of being ‘on the outside’ I think partly explains their drive to succeed. Most of them notably were unable for religious reasons to attend the main English universities of Cambridge and Oxford, often attending Scottish academies instead or bypassing such places altogether. And I was also struck by the sense of limitless possibility afforded by a country which at the time imposed very few restrictions and taxes on the public. 18th Century Britain was a bit like the Silicon Valley of the 1990s, with powdered wigs. Of course there were restrictive practises such as merchant gilds and duties on some imports, but that period surely came about as close to a genuine model of laissez faire capitalism as we have ever seen in our history.
There was much that was very bad and ugly about that period in our history, but also a great deal worth preserving and emulating today. The entrepreneurial gusto of these men is something we could surely use today. Glorious geeks indeed.
The Financial Times in an editorial chastises the U.S. Federal Reserve bank chairman Alan Greenspan for encouraging speculators, such as those mysterious bodies called hedge funds, to snaffle up bonds recently by cutting interest rates to ward off deflation, only to find that bond prices dropped sharply once it appeared the economic situation in the U.S. was improving. (It is too early to say for sure that things are getting better in the world economy though. Certainly not in Continental Europe).
I do not really have a quick way of picking through the rights and wrongs of the FT’s position. I think it is plainly daft that Greenspan, who remains one of the sharpest economic brains around, would have deliberately set out to con investors. What I do think this episode does, however, is reinforce in my mind the enormous risks of entrusting great economic powers to folk like Dr. Greenspan. In fact, the more highly regarded such men and women are, the more lethal the consequences when they slip up.
Even many folk who consider themselves to be ardent free marketeers can get caught up in near religious reverence for the great central banker. Financial speculators hang on every word. The most bland of statements are parsed for some deeper meaning. I have spent too many hours than I care to remember trying to work out if the statement of X or Y actually suggests that inflation is likely to up, down, or whatever.
The cult of the central banker is one of those belief systems of surprisingly short duration, by historical standards. Maybe in decades to come, we will look back on the era of Alan Greenspan and his ilk rather as we would that of the Medieval Popes. And we will be even more struck when we recall that Greenspan, when a young economics student and friend of Ayn Rand, urged a return to old-style private banking and the unfairly maligned Gold Standard.
Watching the news on the ITN television channel last night, the lead item was about the current high temperatures we are experiencing at the moment. What I thought was interesting was the way in which presenter David Suchet announced that “global warming is happening” as if it were no more controversial a statement than to say that night follows day.
Over at the BBC website, meanwhile, you can read all about climate change. Again, the main page presents climate change as a given assumption. There is no place for dissent, scepticism or doubt. For that you have to delve into places like the recent book by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, etc.
Now, unlike some red-blooded defenders of free enterprise, I do not challenge the Greenhouse Effect case as something being put around by neo-luddite technophobes and control freaks. It may just be that the Greenhouse Effect is genuinely occuring. If so, then a good question for the likes of liberty-loving folk is to ask what, if anything, can citizens in a liberal order do about it?
It seems to me that this is a more interesting way to present our case rather than simply say, when hearing the latest piece of doomongering, that so-and-so is a Luddite.
In the meantime, thank heavens for the invention of air conditioning.
The European Commission is to fine Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corp for what it claims is the firms’ continuing misuse of its ‘dominant’ market position and will force it to change how its Media Player software is distributed, according to Reuters.
I don’t want to get into the complex issues of whether Gates has or has not ‘abused’ his market position in any way but rather address the core issue: does Bill Gates and his colleagues have a right to exploit the source code they have created, or not? If Microsoft cannot do so, what is the point of intellectual property rights and patents? And how does the Commission judge if a firm X holds a ‘dominant’ position in a particular market? Is it claiming that Microsoft salesmen force to us to buy their products at the point of a gun? Surely not.
Using alternatives to Micrsosoft’s products may be – and often is – inconvenient. Ask any computer user. But unless the EU, the U.S. Justice Dept or any other bunch of property-right grabbers can show that a firm forces us to use its products, such claims should be treated with scorn. Just because a firm is very big, as Microsoft unquestionably is, does not by itself confer coercive power on such a firm. Of course such firms can try to acquire this by screwing privileges out of government, but that is a separate issue.
Bill Gates is not everyone’s idea of a victim, and frankly he is not the most endearing of business leaders. That, however, is besides the point. He and his colleagues created a source code. Over the years, and due to some savvy business decisions, they have made this code the basis of a hugely successful business. Obviously this is mighty troubling to some, even those who may claim to be in favour of free enterprise.
The EU is telling Bill Gates, “Don’t get too big for your boots, and certainly don’t get too successful”.
I have noticed that quite a few libertarian-minded folk, including the late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, have been interested in exploring the ramifications of extended human life spans.
After all, if you believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then I suppose it is a natural concomitant to be interested in pushing the envelopes of life as far back as possible. Why bother to settle for three-score years and ten? And of course the demise of religious belief among many in the West – though not elsewhere – has given a certain poignant edge to the avoidance of death for as long as possible.
Extending life spans has all kinds of economic, cultural and philosophical implications. If people know they have a much greater chance of living longer than their parents, it could effect career choices, child-rearing, and behaviour patterns in the broadest sense. Extending life spans may make people more cautious and risk-averse in some ways, perhaps accentuating the current vogue for pursuit of the healthy life and increasing pressure on practises like smoking and alcohol consumption. It may also encourage positive behaviours, encouraging people to think more about the long-term effects of their actions. If you know there is a good chance of your making it to 150 years old, it may tend to affect the way you behave now.
There is a long and interesting article on CNN full of details about new scientific advances. I don’t necessarily accept all its conclusions but it has plenty of food for thought on this fascinating topic.
Here’s a random thought – intellectuals with good ideas and boundless curiosity often outlive their peers. Hayek made it to 90, Milton Friedman has just enjoyed his 91st trip round the sun and Karl Popper also made it past 90. Maybe Samizdata should launch a range of health products with the slogan – liberty for a longer life!
Aaron Barschak, the loon who thought it was amusing to dress up as bin Laden and gatecrash a fancy dress party hosted by the Royals, has not been able to draw in the crowds at the Edinburgh arts festival this year, according to this report.
The gag is definitely on him. Here’s hoping he crawls under a rock where he came from. Sorry to be killjoy, but dressing up as terrorist is not my idea of a joke.
Veteran Labour MP, fierce opponent of the European Union and one of the more congenial politicians, Austin Mitchell, has his own blog. Mitchell is a pretty outspoken MP, and though his mixed-economy Keynsian economic views are hopelessly wrong-headed and out of date, he is one of the more independent minded MPs in our rather colourless political landscape.
I had a brief look at his blog and it should be good to read, though Austin had better be prepared for how fellow bloggers will be ready and willing to ‘fact-check his ass’ at a moment’s notice.
Come on you Tory MPs, get a blog!
One of the few drama series worth watching over at the BBC (sharp intake of breath!) is the programme Spooks, which purports to show how M15, Britain’s secret service, operates. A short while ago, an episode featured how the various operatives dealt with radical Islamic terrorism.
What interested me was the very fact that such a controversial topic would be aired by the BBC at all. The series tended to start off with a decidedly politically-correct slant, so broaching the topic of Islamo-fascist terror was quite brave. Makes me wonder how the script-writers were able to get this episode on screen.
Well, as this story shows, the episide triggered a number of complaints, claiming the programme was racially stereotyped. But then it is a bit difficult to do a programme about spies taking on the likes of al-Quaeda and it not to encounter such an issue, I would have thought.
More broadly, though, this got me thinking about how television and movie dramas have handled issues like this over the years. In the early James Bond movies, for example, the bad guys were either Russians or former Smersh agents, but as the series progressed and got ever more silly during the Roger Moore era, the villains became less ‘political’, no doubt to avoid the kind of complaints that Spooks has encountered.
There have always been a few interesting exceptions, though. Some of the Tom Clancy books adapted for film touched on issues like Northern Ireland, although often not very convincingly.
Do I detect a change in trend? The American series “24”, for example, makes no bones about enormously contentious issues. I think people want a bit more hard-edged realism in their dramas, and if that means upsetting some people, so be it.
However, I am not sure whether 007 will be staging his next adventure in Bagdhad any time soon.
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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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