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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Unlike Dale Amon, one of this site’s editors, I am not much of a fan of Ron Paul, or at least, not a fan of some of the people who back and cheerlead for his campaign. I can respect, even admire, how he has been consistent in pointing to the folly of central bank financial manipulation, which is why his campaign against the Fed is something I admire. I can also appreciate how he has pushed some important libertarian ideas into the political culture. A lot of people whose views I respect say that he has done a tremendous amount of good. And they argue that yes, that whole business about the letters back in the late 80s and early 90s was poor and did not reflect well on his judgement – hardly a good thing in a potential POTUS – but hey, plenty of people make mistakes and Paul has disowned this stuff.
But one of the things about the Ron Paul campaign that has concerned me is his foreign policy stance. I am not complaining about his anti-interventionism. That’s entirely consistent with a libertarian point of view; it draws on the wisdom of realising that one intervention inevitably breeds another and and another and so on in endless, disastrous profusion. But where he seriously leaves me behind is when he starts to make excuses, or gives the impression of doing so, for lousy regimes and individuals. Case in point being a video arguing that there would be a parallel between how Americans might feel if foreign troops were based in say, Texas, and the situation regarding US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tim Sandefur, a long-time critic of Ron Paul (he has called RP a “conman” and not a libertarian), has a ferocious article about the video, and in particular, brings up the issue of the American Civil War to highlight what he thinks is wrong with the video’s underlying premises and arguments.
“The video starts out by inviting us to sympathize with the Islamofascists, who, we are told, are led to military “resistance” against a foreign occupier—that is, the United States. Imagine that, say, the Chinese or the Russians maintained a military base in Texas, and that thousands of armed troops from such a nation were patrolling American streets. Wouldn’t that be awful? So surely we can understand why al Quaeda in Mesopotamia plants roadside bombs to kill American soldiers, no?”
“One notices right away that this opening sentence demands that we ignore the differences between the American forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the forces of al Qaeda and its allies—or the relative characters of the nations or institutions on whose behalf they act. American troops, representing a democratic nation that liberated Iraq from the barbarism of Saddam Hussein and helped to institute the first-ever democratic governments there and in Afghanistan, are to be regarded as the moral equivalent of, say, the People’s Liberation Army patrolling the streets of Dallas. Of course, once one accepts this moral equivalence, one is prepared to accept anything.”
Then, several paras later, this is:
“The climax of this moral equivalency comes in the middle of the video, when we are explicitly invited to imagine ourselves joining with some Holy Army of Martyrdom to “defend our soil and our sovereignty” by fighting against this invading army—and to feel sorry for these freedom fighters who are (so sad) labeled by an unfeeling world as terrorists or insurgents. This absurdity mutates into a thinly veiled accusation that Americans are simply committing genocide. At this point, one loses any interest in watching further.”
“Soil and sovereignty” is a particularly interesting choice of phrase: note that even this video does not have the chutzpah to suggest that those who strap bombs to their chests or set IEDs by roadsides in the Middle East are doing so in defense of, say, justice, or individual rights. It is just a question of “soil and sovereignty.” Of course, “soil and sovereignty,” or “Blut und Boden,” has long been the favorite slogan of all fascists. What it really means is, “room to oppress with impunity.” It is the demand for the freedom to enslave. Failure to recognize this is what has so often led otherwise sensible and sensitive people to mistake despotic thuggery for wars of national liberation—often until it is too late, and the bell tolls for thee.”
A question, though, is that its defence of intervention into brutal regimes does beg the question of who gets to decide which regimes fail a test of decency and should therefore be dealt with? But it is a good article, and I recommend the whole of it. Here is the final paragraph:
“By ridiculing the notion of defending democracy and preserving the peace in the Middle East, by regarding the troops of a democratic coalition in a region pock-marked with totalitarian fascist states as equivalent to a communist military patrolling the towns of Texas, the video ignores the difference between justice and tyranny, between peace and desolation, between freedom and slavery. And one who chooses to blind himself to these differences has chosen to blind himself to everything of importance in the world.”
Exactly so. If one is serious about belief in expanding freedom, would one not, to take another example, want to do something about the guy down the street who is known to be torturing his wife and kids, even if his actions had no direct bearing on one’s own?
At the same time, this article, by constitutional scholar and classical liberal, Randy Barnett, is a thoughtful item about some of the possible contradictions and problems associated with issues of sovereignty, liberty, and war.
But the question remains: however powerful the sort of arguments that Sandefur presents – and they are very powerful – who gets to decide that it is okay to pull the trigger? That is what makes these debates so infernally difficult.
Author’s note: It seems that we have started Monday in full “let’s shoot at Cameron” mode today. Well, it is still the game shooting season.
The comments from UK prime minister David Cameron, saying it would be wrong to scrap the UK top income rate of 50 per cent on incomes of £150,000 a year or more (which when other changes are taken into account, means a marginal rate of more than 60 per cent), are typical of this regime. The government knows that the tax rate is well on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, but this, remember, is a regime that cares with almost pathological zeal about the image it projects. The key is to show that those evil, high-earning bastards (like the sort of people who start businesses and run them) take their “fair” share of the current pain being inflicted in the name of deficit reduction.
The Tories played a high price for an inept general election campaign that required them to ally with the Liberal Democrats, a party full of people whose hostility to entrepreneurship and wealth creation is even more severe than it among parts of the Labour Party. And this hostility to high earners comes particularly ill from politicians, such as Mr Cameron, who have enjoyed the benefits of a rich inheritance rather than having to get their hands dirty by creating a business from scratch. Very ill, indeed.
Nicholas Wapshott, a columnist and book author about Reagan and other historical figures, has seen the film, “The Iron Lady” (about Margaret Thatcher). I am going to see the film this evening with my wife and two friends, both of whom are pretty big fans of the lady. Wapshott, writing over at Reuters, hated the film. (Reuters carries signed columns these days, and its writers can be far more open about their biases, which is all to the good).
“But it is the chilling image of a once dominant leader reduced to a fumbling, mumbling old crone that is the movie’s main theme and, while it may pass muster as a sly piece of brutal political theater, as a record of Thatcher and her many achievements, both for good and ill, it is a pitiless, poisonous travesty. Streep has lent her extraordinary acting skills to perhaps the most shameful and cruel piece of political revenge ever to have made it to the screen.”
“Would Henry Fonda have volunteered his name and faultless reputation to “The Deranged Mr. Lincoln”? Anthony Hopkins dignified Oliver Stone’s somber “Nixon” by trying to get beneath the skin of the paranoid president brought down by his private demons. Even Josh Brolin in Stone’s hilarious “W” made America’s most contentious president in recent times a likeable, surprisingly complex eldest son yearning to show his father he was worthy of winning the White House.”
Another paragraph from later in the review:
“It is in the context of Thatcher sharply reducing the size of the state that the violence between picketers and police and the poll tax riots that punctuated her reign can be best understood. There is a high political price to be paid for redrawing the boundaries between the private and public sectors, and for deliberately provoking a recession, in the face of well organized opposition. In “The Iron Lady,” the newsreel shots of cars burning and mounted police beating miners with batons are left unexplained.”
Wapshott’s review is interesting because, as I noted a few weeks back when discussing a review I read in the Spectator, some reviewers from the left have had their brains scrambled by a film that makes them sympathise with a person who has lost some of her mental powers.
So, having read this review, I am still going to see the film with an expectation that this will be an interesting production. For the subject of this remarkable person continues to fascinate, a fact no doubt given heightened interest due to how, for example, the disaster of the eurozone has given some of her old skepticism about the hubris of Eurofederalism new relevance. Her old preaching about the importance of thrift, saving and hard work is hardly irrelevant.
The changes that Margaret Thatcher wrought in the UK are profound, but it is also worth pointing out that she fell short of what she might have hoped for on a number of fronts. The state continues to take a huge chunk of our money; our higher education system, much of the media and chattering classes are reflexively anti-capitalist and at odds with some of the key features of Western civilisation. Even today, there are those who pine for the old, brutal certainties of Soviet-era collectivism. And from a libertarian/classical liberal point of view, the Thatcher era disappointed: no real change to the Welfare State; erosions of certain civil liberties; imperfect privatisation; missteps on Europe (such as, arguably, the Single European Act). Welfarism and the associated creation of an underclass of feral, uneducatable youngsters, was not really addressed during her time in office (but then again, it has not been addressed for the past 20 years, hence the kind of violence that hit the UK last summer).
And yet those of us old enough to remember what a mess Britain was in during the 1970s, with its hideous inflation, endless strikes, shabby goods and services, eroding willingness to confront foreign aggressions and general crapness, cannot fail to be struck by the scale of what was achieved in Thatcher’s term of office. In the private sector, the union closed shop is no more; inflation, while still a serious problem (as this blog often points out), is not in the double-digit levels it used to be. Some of the old, inefficient state-run industries have been put into mostly private hands; the City of London, despite some criticisms that can be made of the “Big Bang” deregulation, is unquestionably one of the greatest financial hubs on Earth. And consider this detail although it comes across as a bit crass at times: even a state broadcaster such as the BBC has a show called “Dragon’s Den”, which is about would-be entrepreneurs pitching for venture capital funding on TV. Such a celebration of business would have been unthinkable on such a channel 30 years ago. Mrs Thatcher told the British that it was okay to make the most of yourself. For all her faults and errors, that is one of the “vigorous virtues” (to use a term from a book on Thatcherism by Shirley Robin Letwin) that endures.
And to call oneself a socialist is still, let’s not forget, not nearly as easy for a politician to do today if he or she wants to get elected. Somewhere during the 80s and 90s, I think, that term was discredited to a significant degree. Not just by Thatcher, granted – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated discrediting of Soviet-style central planning did for that. But her relentless attacks on socialism and central planning, and her championing of the free market, played a significant part.
Here is a good book on Mrs T by Claire Berlinski, published some time ago. Recommended. Another book worth checking out is the new opus on the history of the Conservative Party by Robin Harris. Charles Moore, whose biography of Thatcher comes out after she dies, has a good column up at Vanity Fair.
Anyway, I’ll write about my own impressions at a suitable point.
For me, by far the worst aspect of the recent re-trial of the Stephen Lawrence murder case has been the fact that it demonstrates the dangers of the decision, by the former Labour government in the UK, to end the old double jeopardy rule. Some of the perpetrators of the crime may now be behind bars, but the wider issues worry me.
The writer Brendan O’Neill, a Marxist who writes at at the online journal Spiked, sees this in class terms:
“It is clear from the orgy of post-conviction self-congratulation amongst the chattering classes (Dacre says yesterday was ‘a glorious day for British newspapers’) that the trial of Norris and Dobson was a political trial. It was a showtrial, or at least a showy trial, which was relentlessly used to advertise and entrench the morality of the new political elites. Just because Norris and Dobson are lowlifes, whom no one will much miss when they are banged up, doesn’t mean we should give the nod to this bending of the justice system to the whims of the cultural elite.”
And another:
“It is fitting that the Lawrence case should end with a political trial, because this was the most cynically exploited and politicised murder in living memory. Lawrence was not the first young black man to have been murdered by racists, nor was he the first black murder victim to have been failed by a seriously botched police investigation. But he was the first black murder victim whose tragic demise was cynically milked by the cultural elite and used as the lynchpin of a moral crusade against Old Britain and its foul, backward inhabitants. In a triple whammy of murder-milking, Lawrence’s death was used by the elites to demonise the white working classes as the new ‘brutes within’; to redefine racism as a disease of the brain rather than as a relation of power; and to dismantle long-standing legal principles that were once seen as central to the justice system.”
He’s got a point, although I would add that, not being as het up about class as Mr O’Neill is, I don’t see the disgust that many feel about race-related murders as some sort of ruling-class plot to stamp on lots of white proles. There is more than just a whiff of a new victimology here of the sort that far-right groups like to pander to.
There is real danger in ending the DJ principle, as it means the Crown Prosecution Service will not be under the same pressure in future to get all of its legal and evidential facts lined up as strongly as possible when bringing a case for trial, because it knows there will always be a chance that if it does not get a conviction on the first occasion, it can always have another crack at it later if something new turns up. It is a bit like European Union referendums: if the voters don’t give the “right” answer the first time, they can always be polled again. (As argued by a commenter on Tim Worstall’s own post on the issue).
A real concern for me is that the original case is over 18 years old. That is a long time and all kinds of issues about memory recall arise. Like I said, I don’t doubt that the guilty persons are the scum that they are but there are broader issues of due process of law at stake.
Here is another look at double jeopardy. And there has even been a film made using the title, Double Jeopardy. The CATO Institute has written on how this issue plays out in the US legal system.
There has been a lot of commentary in parts of the English-speaking media and blogosphere about the US presidential elections, and of course this part of it has had its commentary about the candidacy of the likes of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, for example. The coverage shows how US politics looms quite large over the UK, or at least certain parts of it.
Compare and contrast with the level of commentary one might expect to get about the mid-year polls for the presidency of that neighbour, France. In part, the difference is that the French elections do not hold out any prospect of a pro-free market, limited government candidate making much running, although I may be wrong about that. The language barrier is an obvious issue but it cannot be the only explanation for this difference in coverage. And I also note that in another country, Germany, even the so-called quality papers give pretty scant coverage of the machinations of the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and the other parties. Considering that the future of the euro might hang on who gets to control the German parliament in Berlin, you might think a bit more interest might be a good idea.
We are told that the European Union was all about bringing the big happy European family closer together, and yet as far as parts of the English-speaking media is concerned, some of the more consequential nations in the world get less coverage than a primary race in a US farm state (Iowa). That, I think, is very telling. And it does suggest that the idea of the Anglosphere, as Brian Micklethwait suggested the other day, has legs.
This story is more than a week old, but the case of how a line from the movie “Serenity”, based on the moronically discontinued TV series Firefly, was used in a free speech crackdown is still worth a mention. Here is a video with Neil Gaiman, the SF writer, about the controversy. (H/T, Huffington Post).
More commentary from FIRE, the group supporting individual rights in the US education system.
Maybe I should wear my own Western-style “browncoat” coat in sympathy. I bought it in Ireland and it gives me a nice “Clint Eastwood” sort of appearance.
“American economist Scott Sumner has recently argued that the Fed cannot be blamed for the inflation that led to the Wall Street Crash because the money supply measures that reveal the inflation were not publicly available at the time. As Robert Murphy has responded, the fact that doctors of the time didn’t understand bacteria does not affect the cause of deaths during the bubonic plague. Whether we “blame” central bankers or not is really a secondary consideration to our attempts to understand what happened and why. By assigning blame we suggest that the Fed should have done better. It encourages us to think “if only it did X everything would be ok”. But the problem isn’t that individuals focused on the wrong targets, and the solution isn’t to work out how they can improve. The lesson should be that the nature of central banking – the attempt to centrally plan the monetary system – imposes an epistemic burden on policymakers that they cannot possibly ever fulfil. The Fed wasn’t to blame for the crisis, because any argument for what it “should” have done is insincere. We should absolve it from culpability, and remove the shackles of expectation that we place upon it. It did the best it could be expected to do. And that wasn’t enough.”
– Antony J Evans, economist and what I would call a “sensible-shoes Austrian”.
“At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done. Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks.”
– Mark Steyn
Dan Mitchell, of the CATO Institute and an excellent defender of those much-maligned tax havens, has a list of predictions for 2012 about the global scene. I agree with all of them apart from the sports one. Here are mine:
Obama will be re-elected by a whisker, but the GOP will cement its control of Congress. Hopefully, a credible, free marketeer Republican will be chosen in the next election who does not carry some of the baggage of Ron Paul regarding his more unusual supporters or his flaky views (in my opinion) on foreign affairs. But in fairness to Paul, his achievement in getting the libertarian message out there on issues such as the economy, role of the Fed and the bailouts will continue to resonate, for which he deserves great praise.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged will continue to sell lots of copies; Detlev Schlichter will continue, hopefully, to spread good sense among the financial community and among some policymakers.
China’s property market and wider economy will slow down markedly, though I think it will avoid a hard landing. I am not sure that the country will fully float the yuan in 2012, although it should do so.
The UK coalition government will struggle on, although at least one high-profile Lib Dem minister will resign. I hope it is Vincent Cable, who is an idiot.
Brazil’s economy will continue to grow rapidly. The Latin America economy will gain momentum, apart from such wrecks as Venezuela.
The London Olympics will go off largely without incident and as predicted, the British taxpayer will be paying for it for many years. Boris Johnson will try and milk it for his own political purposes, probably with some success.
Sarkozy will lose the French presidential elections unless the economy improves. The French National Front will again get a lot of votes.
Mobile technology will continue to change the banking industry.
Italy’s public finances will remain a mess. And yet in spite of it all, the northern part of Italy will continue to be the rich, beautiful place it often is, confounding some of the doomsters.
Greece will leave the euro; possbily one more country may do so. Turkey’s efforts to join the EU will continue to founder.
The issue of the “education bubble” will remain one of the biggest domestic policy screwups in nations such as the UK and US. Policymakers will tinker with it.
Cheap flights will remain one of the main positives about living in Europe.
Pope Benedict’s failing health (he looked absolutely shattered in his Christmas address) will become more of a talking point.
AGW alarmists will continue to lose ground. A major politician in a big country will take on the Green lobby. (Well, we can hope so).
There will be continued big advances in areas such as nanotech and medicine, mostly shockingly under-reported.
Parts of Africa will get more prosperous.
Commercial space flight will loom even larger as a reality. Hooray!
Piracy in the Indian Ocean might abate as countries adopt harsher methods to deal with it. More merchant vessels will be armed or escorted by vessels that are as insurance premia adjust.
Argentina will occasionally make sabre-rattling remarks about the Falklands, which will be largely ignored.
England might actually do quite well in the European Championships soccer tournament; England’s cricket team should have a decent year. People from Northern Ireland will continue to win lots of golf majors. Roger Federer might – as he has shown from recent form – win Wimbledon again, confirming he is the greatest sportsman of our time and the most famous Swiss person in the world.
Lady Gaga will start dressing demurely as a way of shocking her fans (I am one of them).
The quality of driving in Malta will continue to get worse.
Latin will make a comeback as a subject in UK state schools.
Finally, more of a hope than a prediction: Hollywood will make a decent hard science fiction movie this year and Ipswich Town will avoid relegation, just.
Happy New Year to you all (apart from the trolls).
Here is an interesting article about growing fear-mongering about nanotechnology. Of course, even one of the founding fathers of the nanotech idea, Eric Drexler, has warned about the underside of this technology.
“One of the more unexpected things I discovered as CEO of a pharmaceutical company was that I had to think as much or more about the federal government than I did about our competition. I had known on an intellectual level that government was involved in the private sector in a great many ways, but it was only when I was actually in business that I felt the full impact.”
Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, page 253. He is describing his time in the private sector during the late 70s and 80s, and emerges as quite a firebrand for supply-side economics (he got to know Arthur Laffer).
Whatever you think of Rummy as a defense secretary (under the Ford and George W. Bush administrations), he comes across as a formidable man of US public and commercial life.
Here is something that I wrote about the FDA and associated drug regulation issues a while ago here.
“Open-source intelligence has always been crucial, but for most of the cold war it was neglected by western intelligence agencies,” says Calder Walton, a research associate at Cambridge University and author of the book Empire of Secrets, to be published in 2013. “That was the archetypal intelligence war: intelligence necessarily involved information that couldn’t be gained from any other source — human agents or telephone tapping.” That doesn’t mean covert intelligence was more effective, though: Daniel Moynihan, a former US senator, compared CIA reports gathered from secret sources with Soviet documents recovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and found they significantly overestimated Soviet capabilities. But he discovered that western think tanks using publicly available material, such as the RAND Corporation, were much more accurate. US diplomat George Kennan estimated in 1997 that “95 per cent of what we need to know about foreign countries could very well be obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open and available to us”.
Excerpt from an article in Wired, the tech and futurism magazine, about a Swedish investment firm, Recorded Future, that is taking the use of social networks and other systems to new heights in its attempt to get a jump on the market. In the process, it sheds new light on how the intelligence-gathering process works.
Here’s another couple of paragraphs:
The 20 employees of Recorded Future aren’t foreign-policy experts. They aren’t traders either, but if you’d started using Recorded Future’s predictions to buy US stocks on January 1, 2009, you would have made an annual return of 56.69 per cent. (The S&P 500 had an annualised return of 17.22 per cent over the same period.) Between May 13 and August 5 this year, as markets behaved with vertiginous abandon, their strategy returned 10.4 per cent; in contrast, the S&P 500 lost 9.9 per cent of its value. They’re data experts: computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics. And in the data, they think, lies the future.
All Recorded Future’s predictions, whatever the field, are based on publicly available information — news articles, government sites, financial reports, tweets — fed into the company’s own algorithms. The result, it claims, is a “new tool that allows you to visualise the future” — one that is changing how government intelligence agencies gather information and how giant hedge funds place bets. On its website, Recorded Future states: “We don’t grant interviews and we don’t issue press releases.” But behind closed doors, the company is developing the technology that has been described be one tech blog as an “information weapon”.
The businesses was founded by a chap called Christopher Ahlberg, a former member of Sweden’s special forces and a serious entrepreneur. In its own way, this article is just another example of how Sweden is not quite the socialist nation that it is sometimes said to be, either by its starry-eyed admirers or detractors. There is a lot of entrepreneurial zest up there in the frozen north, it seems.
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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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