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.
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Tim Montgomerie, over at the CapX site, writes about his fears of how the UK will fare longer term while the main opposition party, Labour, slides further and further into lunacy. That it is becoming more brutishly statist/mad isn’t in doubt. We have Jeremy Corbyn’s support for secondary picketing in union disputes with employers, calls by him for powers to ban firms from paying dividends if they are not deemed to pay staff enough, ending a nuclear deterrent – while keeping submarines (for what, deep-sea fishing?); potentially moving to give Argentina some sort of stake in the Falklands, talk of reaching out diplomatically to ISIS, “people’s quantitative easing”, and so on. It is a mixture so mad, so evidently mad to anyone with a basic understanding of state-craft and economics, that I remain convinced that Corbyn is not really interested in winning power soon, but is interested in discrediting the very tradition of parliamentary democracy by enabling the Tories to retain power for a long time and hence building up resentment about it. Maybe I am, however, assuming too much in the way of feral cunning on the part of Corbyn and his unlovely allies. Maybe these men and women are sincere, and just unbelievably thick.
Montgomerie’s point about the dangers of their being a miserable excuse for an opposition is true in a sense (competition is healthy) but it is worth noting that when, as in recent years, parties competed over who could provide the best sort of managerialist/half-capitalist/half statist arrangement, the quality of governance was not notably great, in my view. And consider this shocker of a paragraph from Montgomerie, who is, remember, a supposed Conservative:
I can think of many things that the Blair-Brown governments did that benefited Britain and which a Tory-led government would unlikely to have initiated (but has now embraced – and sometimes extended). The minimum wage. Free access to museums and galleries. The targeting of institutional racism in public bodies like the Metropolitan Police. The smoking ban in public places. The (near) abolition of hereditary peers. The establishment of the Department of International Development. Active measures to increase the diversity of parliament. A lower age of consent for gay men.
The minimum wage. This is an economically illiterate measure that to the extent it makes a difference, does so by raising unemployment, particularly among the young, unskilled and among minorities. True, the current Tory government has embraced the idea, but that was more out of low political calculation over trying to “shoot the Labour fox” than out of understanding of labour markets. Bad idea.
Free access to museums and galleries. I am a taxpayer and pay for museums and galleries. Anyone who buys anything like a pint of beer or fills up a car with petrol pays taxes. Clue to Mr Montgomerie: these things aren’t free. Someone get this man an economic textbook.
The targeting of institutional racism in bodies like the Metropolitan police. “Institutional racism”: a sloppy term. Just because the share of police officers on the beat doesn’t match 100 per cent with the makeup of the population in area X does not, ipso facto, prove that there is racism around or that it was a decisive factor at work, absent other forces. And the same applies to arrest data – that X per cent of arrests in London are among young males from ethnic group X does not, of itself, prove there is a problem unless you could prove intent. To discriminate is to choose – which involves a conscious agent. A lot of nonsense gets committed by ignoring this basic point.
The smoking ban in public places. This was a draconian step that, while it is good for non-smokers such as me, is not so great if you value tolerance. Appallingly, it applies to spaces owned by private sector bodies, such as offices and pubs, where the decision should be down to the owners of said as much as possible. With publicly-funded bodies, the taxpayer rightly should have an important say in the matter. A genuine Conservative ought to be able to make that distinction, rather than support a blanket ban.
The (near) abolition of hereditary peers – well, if this system was to be replaced by one that meant the House of Lords remained a vigorous check on the Commons and prevented foolish, ill-drafted legislation getting through, that would be worthwhile. The jury is out.
The establishment of the Department of International Development – a body that takes taxpayer’s money to fund government-to-government aid. There is now quite a body of research proving that much state-backed of foreign aid is worthless, if not actively harmful, and far less effective than encouraging free trade and open access to markets so as to build self-reliance and foster growth. Also, there is the small matter of taxpayers having the right to decide what to do with their own money if possible, as the default position. (Which is what Conservatives are supposed to assume, right?)
Active measures to increase the diversity of parliament. Translation: more women and ethnic minorities. The composition of a political party should be down to the party and its members, rather than decided in any other way. By “active measures”, does Mr Montgomerie support coercive interference with how MP candidates are selected? I should hope not. Parties are voluntary bodies and paid for voluntarily, and should remain so and retain autonomy to select MPs how they like, whether it be for rational or daft reasons.
A lower age of consent for gay men. Sure, encouraging the notion of respecting relations between consenting adults is a good idea. Shame it is honoured so rarely by what passes for respectable opinion these days.
The current plight of the Labour Party is a source for some concern but unlike Montgomerie, I don’t feel particular sorrow over its demise. Labour has presided over a number of disasters in our history. To give some examples, its nationalisation of much of British industry post-1945, based on notions of state control and central planning, did immense harm, and the punishingly high income tax rates after the war, which the Tories did not really reverse until 1979, meant the UK had little in the way of a start-up, entrepreneurial culture for decades. There may have been some incremental good done along the way (some of the criminal law reforms in the 1960s were good) but by and large the achievements of Labour have been negative. If Corbyn finishes this lot off, I am not going to cry into my cornflakes. Sooner or later, the market for a moderate liberal/left, if it is big enough, will be filled.
It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears. They’d backed up the stage to the wall itself so that the wall was acting as our backdrop. We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn’t realize in what numbers they would. And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again. When we did “Heroes” it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer. However well we do it these days, it’s almost like walking through it compared to that night, because it meant so much more.
– David Bowie, describing a concert he gave in Berlin, 1987.
Interesting take from Reason magazine.
RIP. He will be greatly missed and his influence on music has been undeniable.
Preston Byrne, who will be known to some Samizdata contributors, has this fascinating and lengthy comparison about the state of freedom in the US and UK. He comes to the conclusion that according to a range of metrics, the UK isn’t a free nation any longer.
The United States – while free – is never very far away from turning into something similar. The difference in attitude between my two homes (and two passports) is about a heckuva lot more than gun control: it is a misunderstanding about what rights are and how they should work. Modern Europeans don’t seem to notice or even particularly care about state overreach.
“Gun violence is a problem for the government,” says the man on the Clapham omnibus, “so guns should be banned, just as we banned them in England.” He goes on to point out that England wants to ban, or has banned, encryption, extreme viewpoints, democratically-elected foreign political parties, Donald Trump, knives, or whatever other Public Enemy Number One du jour happens to be in vogue, irrespective of whether the evidence supports or requires the proposed legislative action.
Rights, in the mind of the Englishman and in his laws (thanks to sub-section (2) of most Articles of the European Convention), are and shall always be conditional.
On the flip side, Europe can, and does, use policy to achieve social welfare gains far out of proportion to their cost. It is unquestionably better to be a small-time drug dealer (or a member of his family or circle of extended friends) when said dealer finds himself before an English court than if he found himself before one in New York County.
As The Big Short unfolds its racing narrative and the protagonists come to curse the authors of the disaster, and as the movie ends with the epilogue text running up the dark screen, we hear investment bankers, stockbrokers, and rating agencies condemned as pure frauds—criminals who should not have escaped jail. We never once—I know that this defies belief, given what has been published about the crisis—we never once hear government mentioned. Not the Federal Reserve, not the government-created, government-backed Federal National Mortgage Association or the Federal National Mortgage Association [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], not the legislation pressuring banks to make subprime loans. Not one word. A Martian somehow hearing and understanding this movie would not know that government existed—except for a few mentions of how government regulatory agencies were asleep at the switch. Capitalism, the private sector, through greed, stupidity, and sheer denial, brought on this epic collapse of the U.S. economy and endangered the world financial system, which had to be saved by governments.
It is impossible to see this as an innocent error. Perhaps in 2010, when Michael Lewis published his book—possibly, and I am stretching, here—a writer might have focused on the direct, immediate locus of the tragedy and missed its essential cause. But by 2015, when this film was completed and released, dozens of books and articles had laid out explicitly, irrefutably the role of government as enabler of the crisis. I might mention the account by a leading banker, John A. Allison, who went through the entire experience, managed his bank to save its depositors from the disaster, and then told the story in The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure [McGraw-Hill Education, 2012]. There are many other accounts, such as “Who Really Created the Global Financial Crisis”? The Big Short is told as though they do not exist.
Walter Donway, writing in the Savvy Street website (which I heartily recommend).
It is worth noting that portrayals of how financiers operate are not always bad or glaringly lacking in context. As mentioned on this blog before by Brian Micklethwait, one of the best movies made about the crisis has been Margin Call, starring the likes of Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons. That film does not seek to claim that bankers are all evil bastards masterminding, well, evil, like a lot of jumped up Bond villains who are evil because that is what they are. Rather, it shows a lot of flawed, not always admirable but very human, well, humans dealing with a fuck up as well as they can. Even Wall Street, the Oliver Stone movie of the 1980s, is pretty good to the extent that the “Greed is good speech” contains some pretty serious truths (alas, undermined by what Gordon Gekko says later about how business is about a zero-sum game, which it isn’t). It seems the fundamental failing of The Big Short (written by Michael Lewis), both in the book, and the film made about it, is what it leaves out, as Walter Donway correctly notes. There is no fundamental explanation of why the crisis happened. Ask someone why the crisis happened and they blather on about “bankers” or “greed” gives us as much information about developments as when a person tries to explain the origins of the First World War by saying “warmongering”, “Kaiser Bill” or “bayonets”.
I might see the Big Short, but given my own Scrooge-like approach, will buy the DVD when it comes out cheap, or via that capitalist marvel Amazon Prime, to which I now have access. (Woot!)
“On November 21, Iran conducted its second test of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in direct contravention of two U.N. Security Council prohibitions, including one that incorporates the current nuclear agreement — which bans such tests for eight years.”
– From National Review.
Another report via Reuters
Can anyone be in serious doubt that the deal between the US/EU and Iran to lift sanctions against the latter over Iran’s supposed co-operation over being good on nuclear tests is a crock? Another blinding result for Mr Obama’s foreign policy. We have another year of this man in the White House.
In my book, Everything Has Two Handles: The Stoic’s Guide to the Art of Living, I argue that the values of the ancient Stoics can help us achieve personal happiness. I believe that these same values can help our children grow into strong, responsible, and resilient citizens. And what are Stoic values? It’s not just a matter of keeping a stiff upper lip, nor does Stoicism hold that you should tamp down all your feelings. Rather, Stoics believed that the good life is one characterized by virtuous beliefs and actions—in brief, a life based on duty, discipline, and moderation. The Stoics also believed in the importance of taking life on its own terms–what they would have described as “living in harmony with nature.” Stoics did not whine when they were passed over for an award, nor did they throw a hissy fit when they didn’t get their way. As the Stoic philosopher, Seneca (106-43 BCE) put it, “All ferocity is born of weakness.” Perhaps most important, Stoics understood the tremendous value of gratitude — not only for the gifts we have received, but also for the grief we have been spared. Maybe if more children were inculcated with these teachings, we would find our celebrities showing more gratitude and less “attitude.”
– Ronald Pies.
In another article, the author of this item argues that narcissism may explain the recent spate of mass shootings in the US; he seems to acknowledge, which is to his credit, that overall violent crime in the US has actually fallen in recent years, however.
For centuries, people have pondered the meaning of evil. But the solution to the riddle is that evil has no meaning. Evil is the absence of meaning; it is meaninglessness. To build, to create, to act in the world—these all have meaning. Evil cannot. It is only a black hole that can tear apart meaningful things, and return them to the hollow silence of the universe. This is what we mean when we say that evil is “banal.” It lacks the infinite grandeur of even a grain of sand, let alone of laughter, or of a kiss. In that sense, evil does not matter. It is incapable of mattering. It cannot live or mean things. The best it can do is look on in ire, envy, and despair. And the envious are always walled off from the world that we, the living, inhabit, by an invisible and impervious barrier that they erect themselves; they always have the deadly touch of King Midas. We defy evil and envy when we live. Living in this world sheds light into darkness. It is all we can do, and all that needs to be done, and it is more than enough. Therefore, we shall live. We shall be joyful, hard-working, silly, creative, and smart and sexy and brave and fun. Be a brief candle that helps spread another light.
– Timothy Sandefur, writing a long and moving item about a close relation who was one of the 14 people murdered in San Barnadino recently by Muslim terrorists. Read the whole, outstanding piece. I don’t know how Tim had the fortitude to write so well about such a terrible event to affect his family. The article contains links to charities and organisations well deserving of support.
It is indeed interesting, and worrying, that students are so sensitive and censorious today. But I have a question for the hand-wringers, the media people, academics and liberal thinkers who are so disturbed by what they’re calling the ‘Yale snowflakes’: what did you think would happen? When you watched, or even presided over, the creation over the past 40 years of a vast system of laws and speech codes to punish insulting or damaging words, and the construction of a vast machine of therapeutic intervention into everyday life, what did you think the end result would be? A generation that was liberal and tough? Come off it. It’s those trends, those longstanding trends of censorship and therapy, that created today’s creepy campus intolerance; it’s you who made these monsters.
– Brendan O’Neill.
The bigotry and oafishness of these places is now a well-known feature of life in the US and here in Europe. These places are causing damage; these young people are, remember, future voters and legislators. Have we perhaps reached a stage where not going to such a place is in fact a desirable state?
O’Neill argues that the current generation hasn’t arrived at its intolerance from nowhere:
The Yale snowflakes are pathetic, yes. But what’s even more pathetic is the ridicule of the snowflakes by the very generation who created this world in which words are seen as wounding, judgement is considered harmful, and everyone is treated as fragile. Having claimed for 30 years that offensive discussion, or porn or racist newspapers, create a ‘hostile environment’, can the older generation really be surprised that students are now setting up Safe Spaces? The Safe Space is the logical solution to the notion that words and images cultivate a ‘hostile environment’.
Item: Another example of just how messed up American education now is.
There can only be one explanation for the disgrace that is Donald Trump: he must have failed to realise that the film industry’s demonic portrayals of conservative politicians are politically motivated caricatures, not role models to be emulated. In Love Actually, the villain is a crude, lecherous redneck Republican president on a visit to London. He is keen not just to bully Britain but also to force himself upon Martine McCutcheon’s character. Prime Minister Hugh Grant – an anti-war version of Tony Blair – tells him to get lost, tearing up the “one-sided” special relationship in the process, to the cheers of a grateful nation. As an insight into the Left-liberal mind, this scene takes some beating; the US president at the time was George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq had just been completed. But Trump, who unfortunately remains in the lead for the 2016 Republican nomination, seems to be auditioning for the remake.
– Allister Heath.
Read it all. By the way, I have noticed in some other online forums that Trump fans get very annoyed at we Brits opining about his views. Well, he chose to refer to the UK as part of his recent remarks about Muslims, so he puts himself in the frame for criticism. If you cannot take the heat, etc. The same would apply if a Brit, such as the broadcaster Piers Morgan, chooses to bash America for its 2nd Amendment.
There are many weird and angry political movements in the 21st-century West. But it’s hard to think of any as ugly, vindictive and packed with prejudice as the Israel-bashing BDS movement.”
– Brendan O’Neill.
The “safe spaces” that really matter now, after Paris and Mali, are the concert halls, restaurants, cinemas, hotels, workplaces and transportation systems of the free world. The ISIS-held towns and villages in the Middle East need to be liberated so that they might be safe for families to live in peacefully. The real “trigger warning” comes from the guns of those who shot peaceful people in Paris. Those students immersed in a self-indulgent merry go round of protest need to go back to their dorms, turn on the television, absorb what’s happening in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Europe and engage their brains. It is time to put away childish things. We are up against people who don’t want there to be any colleges, who want women to be clad head to toe in black, to barely if ever go outside and to be slaves of men.
– Iain Martin, at the CapX website.
“Whatever its protestations, Corbyn’s far left is not anti-war. Pacifism may not be a moral position in all circumstances but, in my view at least, it remains an honourable belief, rooted in Christian teaching. Corbyn does not share it. He does not oppose violence wherever it comes from, as the BBC’s political editor claimed this week. When anti-western regimes and movements go to war, his language turns slippery. Corbyn never quite has the guts to support the violence of others, but he excuses it like a gangster’s lawyer trying to get a crime boss off on a technicality.”
– Nick Cohen.
For what it is worth, I would not be surprised if this evil man is toppled in a few months, possibly if the May local elections in the UK are poor for Labour. And yes I used the word “evil” quite deliberately. That is what he is. Corbyn is a bad man to the core.
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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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