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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“In all of this, something has been forgotten: that real-life rape, unlike sex, is always a serious business. If a man is falsely accused, it has the power to wreck his life. If a woman – or indeed a man – is the victim, it can do the same thing. We certainly hear a lot about “free speech” from those who will go to the wall for their right to make light of sexual violence. But rape is the opposite of freedom: it means that the victim wasn’t free to say “no” and be heard. I’m not arguing that people should go to prison simply for saying ignorant or unfunny things about rape. Yet free speech also means you can openly deride certain comedians or directors; you can choose not to buy a DVD or go to a show; you can walk out, turn over, or heckle. On this at least, we’ve all got the freedom to decide when it’s time to stop. Maybe it’s time more of us started using it.”
Jenny McCartney, who has been distinctly unimpressed by a recent trend in making light of rape, both of the actual and alleged forms. No-one who is genuinely interested in defending liberty should do so, in my view.
“The next four days were a period torn out of the world’s usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind’s lethargic suffocation. For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of men, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilisation; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone of failure, like the sound of an oriental bazaar where leprous beggars, of spirit or matter, compete for attention by displaying their sores. Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as a man.”
– Ayn Rand, from her essay, “Apollo 11”, taken from The Voice of Reason, page 167.
Neil Armstrong, gone, but never to be forgotten.
Here is a nice documentary about Armstrong which nicely captured his love of flying and science.
What if we have reached a point where the scale and scope of government have become absurdly large? What you would observe is a growing gap between the theories used to justify government expansion and its practical impact. You would observe the cost of education and health care rising, without commensurate benefits. You would observe stimulus programs that increase employment according to computer models but not in reality. You would observe crony capitalism. You would observe budgets distorted by public-sector unions. You would observe fraudulent accounting that shifts costs for pensions onto future generations.
– Arnold Kling
“Perhaps the most annoying thing about Julian Assange (yes, I know it’s a long list) is that he is in danger of giving the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) a good name. Maybe my memory is failing, but I don’t recall any of his supporters being critical of the EU’s fast-track extradition system when it was being debated 10 years ago.”
Philip Johnston, in today’s Daily Telegraph. It is an interesting point to make. Leaving aside Assange for a minute (there’s no need to hurry), the power of extradition creates an interesting point for those concerned about liberty and the importance of due process of law. Some extradition agreements between states might be acceptable if, for example, an offence for which a person is to be extradited to country B from A is recognised as a criminal offence in both nations. However, with the EU Arrest Warrant, you can be extradited into a country from another where the offence in question is not recognised in the place where the person happens to be staying at a particular point in time.
As we have seen with recent controversy about the UK’s extradition agreement with the United States, a person can be moved to the US – and vice versa – without a prima facie establishment of guilt having to be shown in the country where the person is being transferred from. Given the plea-bargaining lottery that the US adopts in certain cases, for example, this seems to involve serious abuse of due process.
These points need to be aired because, amid all the other issues kicked up by the Assange affair (the alleged sex crimes, the activities of Wikileaks, potential damage to military forces in the field, etc) the specifics of extradition principles can be obscured. Unlike some more isolationist types, I don’t have a problem with treaties between states to shift suspected criminals around to see that justice is done, provided there is a reciprocal recognition of the rules of procedure. For instance, there is simply no way that a country such as the UK should have such an arrangement with a state enforcing shariah law, say, or with a country such as Russia, which is a police state, or for that matter, Ecuador.
There is something grimly amusing at reading Matt Yglesias, purveyor of conventional (ie, wrong) thinking on matters economic, getting a bit sniffy about the way in which certain commentators, such as Bryan Caplan, cite the great insights of the 19th Century French thinker, Frederic Bastiat (well known to this blog, of course):
“Bastiat’s alleged broken windows fallacy involves simply assuming that there’s no such thing as genuinely idle resources or an “output gap.” In that context, yes, it’s a vibrant intuitive depiction of crowding out. But this doesn’t counter any Keynesian or monetarist points about the viability of stimulus during a recession induced by nominal shocks, it involves assuming that no such recessions can occur even though they plainly do. In defense of Bastiat, at the time he was writing the modern industrial business cycle was a very new thing and the vast majority of economic ups and downs were caused by things like bad weather which—as you can see in the corn futures market today—is indeed a decisive consideration in an agricultural economy. But that’s no excuse for people sitting around in 2012 to be pounding the table with an old book that’s non-responsive to modern issues professing to be baffled why people don’t find it more persuasive.”
The point is that the issue of “idle resources” or an “output gap” only makes sense if you start from the position of assuming that there is an optimum amount of economic activity to be had, and that supposedly clever central bankers (try not to laugh please) know what this “gap” is and have the skills to fill it. Given the manifest failings of Keynesianism – and arguably also some of the cruder forms of monetarism – it seems those who want to push this approach are under an onus of proof.
Yglesias also writes about one of Bastiat’s most famous satires of businesses, the one where he mocks firms that ask for protection against competition: the “candlemaker’s petition”:
“The best example of this is probably “The Candlemaker’s Petition” which is a pretty hilarious satire of rent-seeking. And obviously rent-seeking is a real thing, worthy of being satirized. But there are no political controversies for or against pure rent-seeking. The candlemakers’ petition is a devastating satire of pharmaceutical companies’ endless lust for patent rents, unless you happen to think that pharmaceutical patents and the monopoly rents they generate are a crucial engine of R&D funding and life-saving research. Are the pharmaceutical companies right? I think it’s questionable, but I also don’t think you’ll find the answer in Bastiat.”
That is quite cute and he has a decent point – not all requests for protection of a business are, ipso facto, wrong, but this does not really work as a smackdown.
The argument for patents (and as we know, classical liberals have sharp disagreements about intellectual property rights, as shown by the likes of Greg Perkins, say, or Tim Sandefur, or this guy), is that they are incentives to capture the commercial use of an idea for a specified period of time on the basis that creating such property rights in commercial inventions increases the likely existence of said in total, which is different from tariffs, where there seems to be clear evidence that such things reduce the overall economic pie. (Critics of IP sometimes argue that it stifles overall innovation, but I have seen no conclusive evidence either way.) Thinking of Bastiat’s satire, it does not really, in my view, mean that I would scorn a firm or individual for seeking to protect an original idea from being copied by someone else without payment. In any respect, the presumed “rent seeking” failings of IP (and there are problems) can be seriously reduced by reforms, such as granting patents to independent inventors of a gadget, greater disclosure of invention processes in patent filings, an efficient secondary market in IP, shorter IP durations, and so on.
It is good that those of us who venerate Bastiat are forced to think through how his ideas apply to such matters, even to the point of working out if he has any weak spots. But I don’t see that Yglesias has landed the killer blow that he thinks he has. And he cannot just write Bastiat off as a witty Frenchman whose insights are out of date. They are screamingly relevant, just as Adam Smith and others of that vintage are.
I suppose it is good that Mr Bastiat is getting up the noses of some folk. That counts as progress. There’s plenty more where that came from.
(I realise that this is the second time in a row I have written something with a French angle. A pity that French president Francois Hollande does not share the wisdom of Bastiat.)
Update: Caplan responds with some more observations on how policy wonks live in the sort of bubbles that need to be pricked.
“What irritates me about France today is how the taste for work, for effort, has been completely lost.”
– Bertrand Meunier, who recently agreed to move to London from France to take a job at private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. He is one of many such people who are leaving that country to come to the UK in the wake of new, heavy taxes imposed by the recently elected socialist government in Paris. In the relative sense, London is marginally less ghastly than Paris, tax-wise. If you are a French person looking to work at a school for Gallic expats’ children in London, that looks like a growing business to be in.
“People who do otherwise commendable work are capable of rape and other crimes. If presented with rape allegations, they must face them like anybody else, however otherwise worthy their past contributions. Now, these statements should be so self-evidently obvious, it is ludicrous that they need to be said. But the furore over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sadly makes it necessary. Although now granted political asylum by Ecuador, Assange is a rape suspect who skipped bail. Yet some of his supporters have ended up making arguments that they would never dream of making about anybody else.”
– Owen Jones, writing in the Independent. He is, by the way, a big fan of Wikileaks. I am not so keen, as I have explained here before at Samizdata, such as when Wikileaks affected private bank details.
Here is also a good article on the impact of Wikileaks’ activity on investigative journalism, by Nick Cohen.
Update: George Galloway has, er, tried to defend Assange. With friends like Galloway, Assange doesn’t need enemies.
A Reuters columnist says that markets have yet to face up to the fact that there could soon be a “glut” of oil. In other words, the scarcity-mongers are mistaken.
“A final conclusion to draw from the next oil revolution is a little more existential. This is yet another reminder that what both common sense and expert consensus assure us to be true very often isn’t. It was obvious that efficient markets worked and financial deregulation would stimulate economic growth, until the financial crisis and the subsequent international economic recession. It was equally apparent that we were running out of oil – until we weren’t.”
Quite. In these depressing times, it is easy to miss the positives.
As it is holiday season, this item – via Instapundit – got my attention. It is about why some kinds of travel guides tend to be mealy-mouthed about some of the countries they write about:
“There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.”
There is a related point, also. When I occasionally read of how a region or place is “unspoilt”, it often is just an aesthetic comment that area X or Y has not been buggered up by ugly buildings. Fair enough. Even the most ardent defender of laissez-faire does not have to like all the consequences of some buildings. But there is a danger that this can sometimes tip over into a dislike of building and human activity per se. To take one example: I love certain big cities precisely because they are “spoilt” by the energy and sometimes crazy creativity of the people who live in them and build them.
Now that the likes of yours truly are back from holiday to a post-Olympic London, I have been reading about the number of people who noted how quiet London (outside the Games areas) has been. Tranquil streets, empty restaurants, that sort of thing. It appears that the authorities, such as Transport For London, did a “good” job, in a way, in putting the fear of God into the domestic populace. Janet Daley writes:
“What I had not anticipated was that the spectacularly effective campaign of advance warnings and threats to London’s travelling public would cause so much of its working population to abandon the capital. Thus the evacuation of traditionally depressive, harassed, exhausted Londoners made way for the arrival of a lot of rather sweet, smiley people who turned the city into a very jolly and, momentarily, carefree place.”
I am very pleased the event has gone off well. Not least because there were not (unless it has been kept secret) any major security problems at the Games. Lots of sportsmen and women had a grand old time, the capital looked pretty good to outsiders, etc.
The last two weeks does certainly prove that if certain organisations want to convince Londoners that they should get out, they will. Holding the Games in August also helped. And the terrible summer weather leading up to the Games also encouraged a lot of us to hit the airports and railway stations. I may have missed some of the buzz of Olympic London, but the lovely countryside and weather in Southwestern France more than compensated for it.
There is, of course, the matter of the cost of all this. To borrow from Frederic Bastiat, the French economics and legal writer, we can all see the benefits of shiny new stadiums, swimming pools and cycle tracks. That is seen. What is not seen are the things and services that will not be supplied or made due to the taxes and other charges imposed to make the Olympics happen. There are no photos of entrepreneurs whose business plans might be stillborn from such costs, for example. I doubt whether Lord Coe or other Olympic grandees gave much thought to the opportunity costs of such events, or cared. And the insights of Bastiat apply to other “eye-catching” projects: space flights, high speed rail, big aircraft carriers, etc.
Anyway, I am not going to rain on the parade of what appears to have been a successful event. But being the Adam Smith libertarian that I am, it would be remiss not to remind fans of big sporting jamborees that these things have a cost, and the costs will be borne by those quite different, sometimes, from the beneficiaries.
“So the Games have managed to achieve what even Hitler failed to accomplish with the Blitz: the total evacuation of London’s working population. Well, not quite total. There are plenty of poor devils who are still trying to scratch a living in the wasteland of empty restaurants, shops and streets. The trouble is that the the usual customers – the great mass of people who normally commute into central London every day – have been terrorised into staying away by a hugely successful Transport for London promotional campaign.”
Janet Daley, in the Daily Telegraph.
She writes about how so many Londoners have fled the country. I am one of them. More than 7 months ago, dreading what I feared might be the impact of the Games, I booked two weeks’ holiday in southwestern France, staying in the lovely small town of Marseillan, in the Languedoc region (nearest big city is Montpellier). I am actually doing some work down here although I have handed most responsibility to a colleague. My wife and I are having a great time – the weather is glorious without being raspingly hot; the food is amazing and good value; the locals are very pleasant; and last but not least, there is a most gratifying lack of Brits to remind me of home. I do check in on the internet occasionally, but although this might strike some as unsporting, I just haven’t got the “Olympic bug” at all. Yes, I thought parts of the opening ceremony were fun (glad to see Brunel honoured as the great Victorian civil engineer he was), and thought the James Bond routine was hilarious, and was not even all that annoyed about the National Health Service propaganda. (I thought the bit about the Industrial Revolution was actually not bad – all that celebration of carbon emissions and molten steel! But I am just not all that enthused. The greatest sporting festival this year has come and gone (the European football championships), and the Tour de France was also a gloriously unexpected highlight of the year. And as Brian says, there was also the cricket. Always the cricket.
By the way, Bradley Wiggins, winner of the Tour, cycled past where I am now staying, and the locals worship the guy. He has become a bit of a cult in France. They like his character, guts and behaviour.
My blogging output is going to be light for the next 10 days. You see, they sell cheap but excellent red wine here by the litre.
“What I find fascinating is how many intelligent people are willing, even feel urged, to provide intellectual support for a system that is not the result of intellectual discourse but came about – rather non-intellectually – through sheer power politics, opportunism and hubris, and that is evidently failing. Our financial system (or non-system) offers a great example of Nietzsche’s dictum that investigating the true origin and the true motivation behind things most often leads to surprising results. The purpose and the clever design that most people later believe to be behind various institutions are often only projected onto them with hindsight.”
– Detlev Schlichter.
As regular commenter “Laird” said the other day, compared to the chicanery that is modern central banking, the row about the LIBOR business is small beer indeed.
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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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