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]
|
David Gordon, a US writer, has a good review of a book called, unambiguously, The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick.
I liked Gordon’s final paragraph, which is worth waiting for. Assuming his review is fairly based, it is amazing how lame, or downright thin, are the arguments for big government. It is a sort of backhanded compliment to the efforts of free marketeers that collectivists should still feel the need to write such works defending their views at all. Whenever we get grumpy and depressed about the way the world is going, it is good to remember that the other side cares enough about our views to want to try and deal with them, however shabbily.
Update: thanks to a reader for spotting my error in the name of the reviewer. My bad. Now fixed.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel lays out a pretty solid case for saying that the US government will let down international borrowers, and fairly soon. This is not a new or original argument, but he does so with great aplomb. Definitely worth a read.
Arnold Kling has been debating – in a friendly way – with fellow US blogger Will Wilkinson on the relative power of exit, the ability to take oneself and one’s business away from place A to B, for example, with “voice”, such as voting. There is a good Wikipedia item on the forces of “voice” and “exit”. Arnold is definitely an “exit” man and is in favour of things like creating new nations and the power to secede and emigrate. I need to think a bit more about the exchange between Will and Arnold before commenting at great length, but my two cents on this issue amounts to observing how the right of an individual to take his or her money out of reach of a country’s tax net to a less oppressive place has come under a harsh spotlight because of the recent case of Swiss bank UBS.
As I keep saying, the current crackdown on certain so-called tax havens shows that some political leaders understand the power of “exit” only too well; they know that if folk can emigrate, take their money and affairs abroad, then that puts a monkey wrench into the wheels of Big Government. And so there is no wonder that such Transnational Progressive organisations as the OECD and the rest are kicking up a stink about the supposed evils of tax evasion, and putting huge pressure on such countries as Switzerland. It is, in my view, rather important that escape routes remain plentiful, and multiply.
Yes, that’s three posts from me in a day. My holiday break in France seems to have done the trick.
UBS has been closing the secret accounts of its American clients, forcing them into the cold, tax lawyers say. Many Americans with undeclared accounts have sought leniency by making voluntary disclosures to the IRS. Meanwhile, UBS has reported large outflows of deposits, which go beyond its American clientele.
Union Bank of Switzerland is haemorrhaging clients, not just American ones who have unwisely not stuffed their US passports in a shredder, but others too who no longer trust the bank with their privacy.
Frankly UBS was insane to do business in the USA in the first place, given the mafia-like behaviour of the American tax authorities, and the way I see it, this is just a very bad business decision being punished by clients voting with their feet money in favour of more discrete and less bombastic banks that cater to people with the quaint notion that their own money belongs to them and not the IRS… or any other rapacious state.
And any US nationals throwing themselves on the mercy of the thuggish IRS seriously need their heads examined. At the first sign of trouble, and this has been brewing a long time, they should have sold up and got the hell out of the USA for good. The weather in Costa Rica is really very nice, guys, trust me, and your money buys a whole lot more down here.
As I read a recent issue of New Scientist this morning, I very nearly skipped over an article titled “Falling Out of Love With Market Myths” with a photo on the fold of Ronald Reagan walking with Margaret Thatcher. The title and presentation leads one to expect the sort of thing one would expect from British academic types, and ditto, check… the article was written by an Oxford educated academic named Terence Kealey, now a Vice-Chancellor at the University of Buckingham.
I plowed on any way and was rewarded by a very surprising statement:
In fact, the evidence shows otherwise. In 2003, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published The Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, reporting on a comprehensive regression analysis of the factors that might explain the different growth rates of the world’s 21 leading economies between 1971 and 1998. This indicated that only privately funded R&D led to economic growth, and that publicly funded R&D did not. Worse, the public funding of R&D crowded out private funding, and thus slowed economic growth.
Surprising, that is, in the sense of being a key element of an article in New Scientist by a member of academia. It is a very interesting article and well worth reading.
Brian Doherty has an article slamming the record and conduct of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. It will not be news to the likes of us hard-money advocates, but still, well worth your time.
I like Doherty’s recent book on the American libertarian movement, by the way.
The next time Gordon Brown, or his counterparts mock free marketeer “Austrians” such as myself for our opposition to Keynesian monetary expansionism and huge state debt, perhaps they could explain why, after all the vast spending that there has been, we get figures such as this. Just asking.
For those unaware, Mr Kaletsky is an economics writer and supposed investment guru who fully supports the Keynesian view. I assume most readers have heard of Mr Krugman.
The decision by the UK government a few months ago to use anti-terrorism powers over the case of Icelandic banks in trouble has caused deep resentment in Iceland. As this article suggests, such a tactic is hardly a way for Britain – now in deep debt – to make friends with foreign investors. Of course, Mr Brown may have made the calculation that he will be out of power in a few months so why care? But even so, the use of such powers represented a new low for UK diplomatic relations. It also proves the age-old truth that if governments acquire new powers, they will use them in ways far beyond their original scope.
“Groupthink was a major factor in the buildup of risk in the financial system in the decade preceding the recent crisis. Top bank executives and regulators ignored dissenting voices from both ends of the political spectrum which were questioning the excesses that were building up in the system. What was once a comfortable consensus about the strength of our regulatory structure has now been replaced by an equally comfortable and equally flawed consensus about how to fix it.”
Arnold Kling, libertarian-leaning economist, giving a long report on the problems with how the US administration has sought to deal with the crisis, and why he thinks those moves will make future problems more, not less likely. My fear is that for now, such warnings will continue to go unheeded not just in the US administration of The Community Organiser, but in the UK and parts of Europe, as well.
Apparently it is news that the UK is still in recession, or as the headline says Economic recovery in UK ‘on hold’.
On hold? The government is debasing people’s saving as quickly as possible and stripping money out of productive sectors and pumping it into unproductive sectors, and generally trying their damnedest to drive businesses and wealth creators out for years now… and the fact this is tearing a huge hole is surprising to who exactly?
Which is why you can’t trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to “punish savers”?
As I wrote at that time,
[Unsubbed original:] The purpose of banks used to be to make a profit by using the deposits in their care productively at second-hand. That is why they pay interest: to bring in funds to be lent. If they don’t do either then they are no longer banks but state-sponsored rentiers.
Far from encouraging productive capital, Mr Kaletsky’s prescription would have us reverting to a pre-capitalist economy where those with savings dare not recycle them. Their personal cash will end up converted to valuables, hoarded, and hidden to keep them safe from predatory tax farmers. Printing money is also a well-tested means of encouraging the same sort of behaviour.
For a recovery we need capitalism and the market to do their work. However painful, that is better than reversion to the Dark Ages because governments and their advisors want to be seen to be doing *something*. Doing nothing may be the best alternative.
Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human.
I had to read the headline twice. Then I read the article twice. I still don’t get it.
What I first thought it said was,
International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patients
Weird, obscure line, but no weirder than a lot of things that come out of the international development department, and potentially a lot more sensible. I suppose it might make sense for the big southern African companies, especially, to combine their employee health programmes. But if it were more effective, wouldn’t they already be doing it? Wouldn’t the South African government, in any case (now they have got rid of that barking health minister), be the one doing the urging?
What it actually said was,
International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patents
Now that makes a lot less sense. It is quite up to the standard we have come to expect from DFID, a real candidate for economic illiteracy of the day.
[Mike Foster MP] wants companies to contribute to a “patent pool”, which the international drug-purchasing facility, Unitaid – set up by a number of donor countries, including the UK – is trying to establish.
“While it is absolutely vital that we work to reduce the human cost of HIV by focusing our efforts on preventing new infections, we must also face up to the stark reality of the treatment challenge we face. The pharmaceutical industry has an opportunity to act now to help prevent future human catastrophe. It is time for them to state their clear commitment to make new HIV medicines affordable to those who need them most.”
According to the all-party report, if HIV patents are put in a pool, generics companies – which make the cheap combinations now used in Africa – will be permitted to make low-cost copies of newer drugs and devise new combinations in a single pill, which is important for people living in poverty.
What can this possibly mean? There’s no real explanation here of how a ‘patent pool’ might work. It sounds like pharmaceuticals companies are being offered to the opportunity to swap an unstable legal monopoly for an internationally approved cartel, and to pose as humanitarians while doing so. Would that really lower the cost of HIV medication, and improve its effectiveness in general? It is far from obvious why that should be the case. Would medicines that are both cheaper and more effective be permitted to flow back to Western countries? I doubt it.
Which points up the weirdness of the whole exercise. In order to be economic in Western countries, HIV medicines have to be very expensive to buy there. That is not just because they are expensive to develop, but because the absolute numbers of people who need them are small. In the West, just as in poorer parts of the world almost no individual can afford to pay for their own treatment. So there’s a different sort of cartel effect maintaining the oligopolistic market. Government protects the patentees; and government subsidies end up paying for the consequences.
You don’t have to be a believer in the efficacy of beetroot and garlic as anti-virals to notice that the difference between the scale of the epidemic in parts of Africa and the richest parts of the world is not a consequence of the availabilty of drugs – or at least not the availabilty of anti-retrovirals. We have fewer people getting the disease in the first place. But we have fewer people with all sorts of infectious diseases. Malaria and dengue are not more treatable than they were when they were endemic in Europe, and the US, less than a century ago. The difference is better living conditions that everyone will work for if they have the chance.
Patent pooling, it seems to me, is no better than patent farming, in that it seeks to exploit artifical restrictions on innovation that just happen to be there for the benefit of a restricted interest group. It is an exercise in dinosaur husbandry, with little real relevance to improving the lives of us mammals. A reconfiguration of corporarate welfare, with its concentration on subsidising treatment of a particular disease, and bureaucrats swapping targets with bureaucrats, is a distraction from the less collectively ‘manageable’ task of avoiding the spread of infection, which is the invisible part of the virtuous circle of the people who are not sick getting better general health and more comfortable lives. That isn’t going to come from government drug programmes. I suspect it might come from “people living in poverty” having a bit more access to the non-patent and never-patent – but still restricted – technologies of choosing their own priorities and exploiting their own comparative advantages.
|
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.
|
