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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Does anybody know where the words of this can be copied and pasted? I would hate to have to type it all out – or maybe that should be ‘in’ – myself, but somebody definitely should, and if I or any commenter does find it, I will maybe add it to the bottom of this posting. As Peter Hoskin of the Spectator’s Coffee House blog says, Dan Hannan “absolutely skewers” the PM. (Can you kick someone with a skewer? Never mind.) Guido also piles in.
As my fellow scribes here say from time to time: I love the internet. In fact I love it even more than I hate Gordon Brown, and that’s saying something.
ADDENDUM Monday morning: Here it is. Thank you commenter Simon Collis, and blogger Stuart Sharpe.
Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised – where you have not nationalised outright – swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.
Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.
Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising – like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things these things – it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.
You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.
They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.
It will be interesting to see what Britain’s mainstream media make of this. My guess is that the blogosphere will be all over this speech not just today but for a longish time, with constant links back, and that many newspapers will also refer to it during the next day or two. But how will the BBC respond? They are in a lose-lose situation, I think. Mention it, eventually, they lose. Ignore it, they look like Soviet-era buffoons, just as Hannan said Brown is. A bit like the US MSM and those tea parties.
Presumably, by the time the BBC do mention it, the story will be that the Conservatives are divided. Divided, that is to say, in that some of them think the Prime Minister is mad and evil and believe in saying so, while others merely think it.
The wonderful world of web provides us with a way to check what happens to the CAP aptly described by a European leader:
… a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.
via Charles Crawford
IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.
– ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak
First financial, then economic, finally political. The smaller countries will be followed by the larger. In one of his op-eds, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes an overview of Europe in which he opines that the outer rim: the post-communist states and Club Med are entering a 30s style depression due to the unwillingness of the European Commission or Central Bank to alleviate their woes.
Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States are now facing a ‘spring of discontent’ as austerity measures result in rioting and instability. Evans-Pritchard has noted that the European institutions are compunding the problem:
Leaked documents reveal – despite a blizzard of lies by EU and Latvian officials – that the International Monetary Fund called for devaluation as part of a €7.5bn joint rescue for Latvia. Such adjustments are crucial in IMF deals. They allow countries to claw their way back to health without suffering perma-slump.
This was blocked by Brussels – purportedly because mortgage debt in euros and Swiss francs precluded that option. IMF documents dispute this. A society is being sacrificed on the altar of the EMU project.
The political consequences of the credit crunch are coming to the fore in the fragile periphery of the European Union: how long before we begin to see the political expression of this discontent respond to the monopoly of the European class, a challenge that will arise outside the mainstream from the extremes.
One of the reasons why people get so cross about the cost of petrol is the knowledge that a high proportion of the price paid at the pumps is accounted for by tax, rather than the cost of extracting, refining and distributing the stuff. The same goes for a pack of cigarettes, pint of beer or a bottle of wine, to name a few. With a lot of grocery produce, such as your humble carrot, most people may not appreciate – yet – how much of the cost of getting those vital vitamins is accounted for by government-created production costs. Well, there have been a flurry of stories on the wires about a recent EU Parliamentary vote to ban dozens of pesticides that are deemed harmful. As a result, farming groups claim, output of crops will fall and presumably, if other things remain equal, prices will go up at a time when household budgets are under strain. It does not seem to have occured to policymakers that a simple option would be to put what chemicals are used to treat crops on a packet so that consumers can figure this out for themselves and take an informed decision.
The trouble with stories like this is that the votes to ban X or Y at the EU level rarely gain a lot of coverage for more than a day or so, and then the issue tends to fizzle out, of interest only to obsessives and geeks like yours truly. A busy populace, worried more about their jobs, mortgage or children, will hardly dwell on the issue. But when Mr and Mrs Briton wonder why on earth it costs so much to buy basic groceries, the temptation will be to imagine that it is the fault of big, evil supermarket chains, for example. Rarely will the cause of the cost be seen as stemming from bureaucrats and European MPs.
Of course, it may well be that the chemicals being banned are as harmful as is claimed, although given the way these things work, I doubt it. We are told that for a healthy diet, your average person requires several servings of fruit and veg a day; such things are considered good for warding off cancer. Even if there is a health risk from chemicals, the health risk of not eating enough vegetables because of high costs is even higher. These things involve a trade-off between one set of risks and another, rather than some imperfect and perfect state. If such chemicals are banned, resorting to grow-your-own is hardly a viable alternative, since modern farming can, through economies of scale, achieve better yields and lower costs-per-output than someone tending their vegetable patch. And importing fruit and veg from countries such as Spain via air transport, for example, is also becoming less attractive an option due to increased fuel prices and governments’ taxes on air travel.
Once again, the Forgotten Man gets the shaft. This chemicals ban, like measures such as “employment rights”, paternity leave or 35-hour weeks, impose costs on the populace without a government having to take the potentially visible and unpopular step of raising taxes. Joining the economic dots is hard. I just hope that some in the MSM try and do so occasionally so that the message gets through. We bloggers cannot do it all on our own.
Update: in the comments, one person argues that I have contradicted myself by pointing to public apathy or lack of time to scrutinise EU actions, on the one hand, and my stress on the ability of consumers to read packaging labels, on the other. There is no contradiction, though. People shop daily, weekly, monthly, etc. They constantly come up against labels, look at packaging, see advertisements, surf the Net looking at products, and so on. One of the great things about markets is that it is a constant provider of information. Not always accurate, of course. By contrast, once an EU directive has been imposed, that is usually the last that any ordinary member of the public will hear about it. As soon as a law is passed, the media and political wagon rolls on.
A half-remembered phrase from a short story by C S Forester is lodged in my mind. The story is set in World War II. Some sort of British warship has to approach very near an enemy-occupied coast, do something or other heroic, and then get away before the German artillery can do its work. The ship, under the guidance of its iron-nerved captain, does so, and then – futzed if I can remember the details – stops or delays to do something else, to serve some side order of military misery to go with the main dish, the captain having calculated that it will take a certain amount of time for the defenders to wake up, realise this is for real, get orders and crank up the guns or whatever. Everyone else on the bridge makes their estimate of how long all this will take erring on the side that one does generally err on when the penalty for error on the other side is to be shot at by artillery, but the captain makes his estimate the way he would from his armchair at home. His bold guess is right, and the ship gets away. And then comes the phrase that shows clear among the fog of my other memories of this story: those watching on the bridge were awed by his sheer will to do the enemy harm.
I dare say in WWII there were many people, ordinary people, who really did spend a substantial fraction of their time thinking up ways to hurt the Axis. No doubt most of them ended up bombarding the War Office with absurd plans and inventions that came to nothing, but some of them found ways that worked. It must be rather interesting to live in a time and a place where it is good to let the will to harm the enemy run free.
We in Greater Europe do live in such a time and place. Don’t get excited. I am not advocating violence. In fact I get a little disturbed when Tim Worstall, the blogger whom I am about to quote, makes his customary appeal for a hempen rope and a strong beam. But when I read on his blog about this latest measure from the EU, all I could think was harm them. Bring them down. Please, I would be grateful.
How can we bring down the European Union?
As of today, the Czech President Václav Klaus takes control of the largely symbolic but quite high profile office of President of the EU. Given his stridently pro-free market and highly Euro-sceptic utterances in the past, the sense of dread in Brussels is palpable. He is a brusquely outspoken man and I cannot wait to see how he uses the bully pulpit that the EU Presidency provides.
In an electronics market in China last month, I found these intriguing items for sale.
Okay, “MP3” I understand. The MPEG-1 standard for digital media storage and transmission contained three audio formats. These were MPEG-1 audio layers 1, 2 and 3. Of these, layer 3 provided the highest audio quality, became the standard for compressed digital audio, and “MPEG-1 layer 3” became abbreviated to “MP3”.
“MP4” is slightly more problematic. The successor standard to MPEG-1 was MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is very important, but mainly because it contains much more advanced video formats than MPEG-1. DVDs and most digital television applications use MPEG-2 video. In terms of audio, MPEG-2 contains the three existing formats from MPEG-1 (including MP3) and a more advanced format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Perhaps confusingly, AAC is very seldom used with MPEG-2 video, which is much more frequently paired with the MPEG-1 audio formats, or with Dolby AC-3 (which is not part of any of the MPEG standards).
However, AAC is also part of the MPEG-4 family of standards. (There is no MPEG-3). Due partly to AAC being the favourite audio standard of Apple, AAC is commonly paired with the video standards of MPEG-4, the two most common of which are the Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG-4 part 2) and the now favoured Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 part 10, known also as ITU-T H.264). This partnering between AAC and the MPEG-4 family of standards can mean that AAC audio is sometimes referred to as “MP4 audio”, with “MP4” as an abbreviation of “MPEG-4”, even though AAC as a format technically preceded MPEG-4. In addition, media of this form is often encoded using the MPEG-4 part 14 container format, which usually has the file suffix “.mp4”. Thus it makes a certain amount of sense for an AAC or MPEG-4 capable media player to be referred to as an “MP4 player”. In this case the “4” in MP4 means something different to the “3” in MP3, but there is some logic to it.
As to what an MP5 player might be, that is on a par with the European commission announcing that we must take steps to “put Europe into the lead of the transition to Web 3.0”, I fear. Sadly, I think it is unlikely that they are selling these.
Poor naive George W. Bush! For all his shambolic presidency, his dreadful mistakes, and the horrors of aggressive imperialism, his last couple of months in office could end up being the most disastrous for the world.
Bloomberg reports:
The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election.
President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement after meeting yesterday that they will continue pressing for coordination to address “the challenges facing the global economy.”
The initial summit will seek “agreement on principles of reform needed to avoid a repetition and assure global prosperity in the future,” and later meetings “would be designed to implement agreement on specific steps to be taken to meet those principles,” the statement said.
Just how bad this could be is already showing. The report continues:
Sarkozy and Barraso are pressing Bush for a G8 agenda that includes stiffer regulation and supervision for cross-border banks, a global “early warning” system and an overhaul of the International Monetary Fund. Talks may also encompass tougher regulations on hedge funds, new rules for credit-rating companies, limits on executive pay and changing the treatment of tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Monaco.
Just what has the continuation of the OECD nations’ campaign to plunder smaller states and institute globally uniform (high) taxation got to do with the market crash? Nothing. Executive pay? Irrelevant, too, save in the politics of envy. Mainstream banks, not hedgies, were the ones that crashed after playing iffy games with CDOs, and governments helped pump-up house prices – with enthusiasm. Where this agenda comes in is as an opportunity to kick the resented “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism while it is down – even, and especially, in those places where it is not down yet. (Are we missing Commissioner Mandelson yet?)
Mr Bush has lost the thread entirely if he really thinks a transnational “reform” of the financial system can do other than damage “free markets, free enterprise and free trade”. He may have a patchy record on liberty, and a bad record on limited government. His guests in November will have no interest in either. They will tempt him (have tempted him) with the mantle of world saviour, and will try to get him to bind his successors. We shall have to hope that his successor, either one of whom would be well to the economic right of the self-selected ‘international community’, depressingly enough, is more wily and far-sighted.
Meanwhile, where is there left to run?
Peter Mandelson’s re-appointment to Gordon Brown’s cabinet is a potential disaster, and not just for Britain.
I have always liked Mandelson more than any other Labour politician. I ought to hate him, because his strategic genius gave us the New Labour revolution of the last decade. But his lucent unwillingness to pretend he is an imbecile, to conceal the fact of his cunning, or to act out his party’s customary hatred of private enterprise, even while his pupils execute their vile populist capers, is to me endearing.
Maybe that is why I’m worried more than stunned by his return to British politics. While most commentators are mesmerised by the story of Brown’s feud with The Prince of Darkness, and the daring of playing with Labour Party’s own resentment of him by bringing him back from Brussels, I am more interested in strategy. Do not just look at the flashy sacrifice; see how it changes the board.
There is now a gap in the European Commission. Brown will appoint one of his favourites to it, and have far reaching influence on Europe, and therefore Britain, even after he steps down. This can be seen as a subtle purge by bribery, and as a retirement strategy. A preparation for the Brown legacy.
There is now a gap in the European Commission. Whoever fills Mandelson’s Trade portfolio will be replacing one of the most free-trade-friendly commissioners that the EU has ever had, in a financial crisis, with protectionist populism surging on both sides of the Atlantic. Brown’s legacy could easily be a trade war and a real depression.
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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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