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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Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.
Wired reports on a scheme to make new nations:
Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?
If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.
With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
Excellent. Most of the bad ideas about how to govern nations have been tried out for centuries. They work moderately well for luckier ones amongst the plunderers, more or less appallingly for the plunderees. The good ideas, like very low taxes, very light regulation – in short: liberty – have been attempted only very occasionally. Anything which tilts that balance in the good direction is to be welcomed. I strongly believe that all social, political, and legal ideas should indeed be allowed on these jumped-up oil rigs (rather than merely my own social, political, and legal ideas), as the Seasteading Institute clearly envisages, but only if all those involved in each attempt consent to being part of it.
That should shoot most of the collectivists at the starting line. Most collectivist political ideas are about what should be done by them, the evil collectivists and their evil friends, to others who can’t defend themselves against their ghastly ideas even by running away, let alone resisting plunder. If only for that reason, the evil collectivists are all going to hate this stuff. And if only for that reason, I already like it, even if it never gets much beyond internet speculation.
The more honestly deluded among the collectivists, who really think that people will consent and go on consenting to their rancid notions, like those 1620-vintage (have I got that date right?) settlers on the east coast of what is now the USA, will, if they are ever silly enough to try one of these schemes, get a crash course in what they really should be doing and how the world really works.
I found out about this plan via one of my internet favourites just now, BLDG BLOG. The BLDG BLOG man is torn between architectural excitement and political unease:
It’s not just a question of producing better loft apartments, for which you can charge an extra $300,000, or of perfecting the art of luxury kitchen space; it’s a question of designing architecture for extreme conditions and, should your architecture survive, thus opening up room for a new form of what might be called post-terrestrial sovereignty, i.e. governance freed from landed terrain.
Which is not to be confused with advocacy of the project; I just like discussing its political side-effects: architecture becomes wed with, indeed inseparable from, a political project. It is construction in the service of constitutionality (and vice versa). Wed with oceanic mobility, the architecture of seasteading doesn’t just aesthetically augment a natural landscape; it actually encases, or gives physical shape to, a political community. It is architecture as political space in the most literal sense.
He’s not advocating it, you understand. Perish the thought. Who knows what frightful political genies may be let out of the bottle of the twentieth century collectivism to which most architects are still wedded? But, he can’t stop himself thinking: cool. I hope he’s right. About the coolness, I mean.
I’ve been doing some more reading of the Wired piece. One of the moving spirits behind the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, who is David Friedman’s son. If David Friedman is anything to go by, Patri (whom I have not met but whose blog I dip into from time to time) is surely a great guy. However, this makes me fear that the people doing this particular scheme are experts not on money, power, etc., but on libertarianism. This is not a good sign. Schemes like this cannot merely be virtuous. They have to work, and I fear that this one won’t. I mean, if it only starts to look like working, think of the number and nature of the people who will want it squashed. I really do hope that I’m wrong about this particular scheme. If I’m only wrong once about schemes like this, it will be a different world and a massively better one.
The Daily Telegraph, perhaps not surprisingly as this is not a flattering story for the current government, points out that official figures show that almost 2 million Britons have left the UK since 1997. However one tries to spin this, such an outflow of people is not exactly a ringing endorsement of government policy, although there has always been and I hope will remain a steady two-way flow of people to and from this island, if only as an expression of the understandable desire of people to live in new places, to strike out to make a new life and so forth. Naturally, much of the media focus will be on the reasons why people are leaving. This is well-trodden ground already (crime, tax, weather, cost of living, etc).
One factor that struck me was that 1.58 million foreigners resident in the UK left during the 1997-2006/7 period, which suggests that while millions of foreigners come to the country, many of them do not choose to stay for more than a few years. What counts of course is the net trend. During the period, 3.9 million people came to the UK, with 500,000 arriving in 2006 alone. The pace of inflow – and possibly outflow – seems to be speeding up.
As I learned on a previous posting about immigration and emigration, there is a tendency – even among generally liberal people – to treat the movement of people from A to B as a utilitarian calculus, to work out if the net benefit or harm of human migration can be computed into a neat, hard number. Rarely does one hear the question addressed in terms of the freedom of a person to move to another place more to their liking so long as they respect the rights and property of whomever they choose to make their new neighbours, do not violate the laws of a host country, etc. Instead, the point is asked, “How does the arrival or departure of people to and from this nation benefit or harm me?” The question has no easy answer. For some low-paid indigenous workers, the sudden arrival of foreigners will put downward pressure on wages in the short run, but add new sources of consumer demand in the medium and long run. An exodus of entrepreneurs, meanwhile, reduces the “national pie”: but should any classical liberal worthy of that name care about the collective wealth held within a given geographical area? The UK is not a company – which has a defined end, like making cars – but an association of hopefully free persons pursuing their own ends within the boundaries of certain laws. I think it is sometimes worth stepping back to reflect on the fact that in this globalised age, millions of people are taking advantage of the ability to find the place to live that most suits them and their families and achieve their ambitions. I happen to think this is mostly a good thing, whatever caveats one can throw in about welfare, the pace of cultural assimilation and the like.
Here is an article by the journalist and parliamentary sketch-writer, Edward Pearce, that is well worth a read.
Anatole Kaletsky is usually good value for his economic analysis. In a pretty scathing column today about the collapse of Brown’s political reputation since becoming Prime Minister last year, Kaletsky tries to contrast Brown the bumbling PM with Brown the masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer. He writes:
Indeed, he was probably the most successful chancellor in modern history, notwithstanding his muddled tax reforms, his badly timed gold sales and the fatal damage he allowed the regulators and courts to inflict on Britain’s pension funds. Mr Brown made the right decisions on monetary policy and the Bank of England. He kept Britain out of the euro. He reduced capital gains and corporation tax more radically than any Tory chancellor and he resisted populist demands to squeeze the rich.
Oh please. Sorry to rain on the parade here, but remember that in the early part of the current decade, Brown subtly shifted the way in which the BoE measures inflation. Without going into a lot of technical detail, he allowed the central bank to pursue a less stringent inflation target, and allowed it to loosen the strings of monetary policy. We are now – arguably – suffering some of the effects. Also – and it is frankly incredible that Kaletsky does not mention this – Brown has presided over a massive increase in the size of public spending and borrowing. During the supposedly fat years, the state of the public finances has actually got worse when it should have done the opposite. Hardly the mark of a good, prudent finance minister. The public sector payroll – no doubt expected to vote Labour – has swollen by up to 1 million since 1997, according to some estimates. That is a collossal increase and a large dead weight on the economy. Again, this burden is weighing more heavily on the economy now that the international environment has become more difficult.
By doing the British economy no serious harm during his long tenure at the Treasury, Mr Brown earned a distinction unique among postwar chancellors, with the possible exception of Kenneth Clarke.
Well, compared to some of the massive errors made by previous Labour and Tory chancellors, it is true that Brown’s record has been quite reasonable, but Kaletsky ignores the substantial shift in the size and cost of government since becoming Chancellor; that amounts to “serious harm” and detracts badly from his record.
Do not misunderstand me. It is not necessary to believe that every move made by Brown has been bad and it is also important to realise that in the globalised financial markets of today, there is only so much – thank goodness – that a finance minister can do. But as we have seen from the continued flight of entrepreneurs and businesses from Britain, from the tax increases, from the poor productivity gains in the UK, and so forth, Brown has been a mediocre custodian of the economy at best. And even his prize achievement, the independent Bank of England, looks less impressive now after the BoE was unable to act swiftly, as it could in the past, over the Northern Rock fiasco.
Tim Worstall has interesting things to say about the difference between social status and economic inequality, pointing out that the two things only occasionally map onto each other, a fact which does rather undermine the egalitarian argument that reducing economic inequality will reduce differences in status. A good point indeed: in the former Soviet Union and in heavily statist countries today, for example, there was and is a gulf between the citizenry and the cliques that run the show. This exists to a lesser extent, however, in the mixed economies of much of the rest of the world, where ‘new class’ of people – bureaucrats, politicians, media folk, academics, quangocrats, etc, hold considerable power and influence, even though they may earn less than say, a Goldman Sachs bond dealer. The gap was arguably far harder to bridge than is the case in the more fluid situation one finds in a pure market order where the process of ‘creative destruction’, to quote the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, destroys once-dominant businesses and dynasties and creates new ones in a never-ending cycle. Tim also makes the good point that having high status is often little to do with money at all. Fame, or having a prestigious job, or being an influential commentator, or whatever, often counts for far more than how much money one has in the bank. Ask yourself this: who has more status in British society – the editor of the Times or a hedge fund investor?
Another way of thinking about the difference between being rich and status is this: in some cultures, where acquiring wealth is sneered at or even suppressed, what counts is the accident of birth, or the ability to pull the levers of political power, or manipulate opinion in some way. As you will, gentle reader, no doubt guess, I think that one of the great things about the pursuit of wealth is that it is, in one of the deepest senses, profoundly egalitarian. Think about all those media commenters who sneer at ‘ghastly chavs’ messing up the view in the South of France or taking cheap flights to Malaga: what this point of view admits, in a way, that capitalism makes it possible for the masses to get on the same ladder as those dealt a good hand by accident of birth. I still think that part of the motivation for the Green movement or strict controls on immigration and population growth is a desire to cut off the ladder of opportunity for the masses (yes, I know this is a bit of ad hominem argument but I think it carries some validity).
For a great book on the subject of envy, which of course lurks beneath a lot of complaints about status and inequality, I recommend this classic study.
Anyway, as Tim rightly points out, people who think that ironing out economic inequality through such methods as steeply progressive income taxes will narrow gaps in status are liable to be disappointed. Humans are by nature a competitive species, and ranking folk according to some metric or other is ineradicable. Also, as the US writer George Gilder wrote in his masterful early 1980s defence of supply-side tax cuts and entrepreneurship, the folly of progressive taxes and other methods is that they do not eradicate inequality. Rather, they fossilise existing patterns of unequal wealth distribution and encourage the most ambitious people in a society to channel that aggression into less benign forms. Not an original insight, of course – Samuel Johnson, the 18th Century writer, made the same point – but one that needs to be rammed home from time to time.
Gordon Ramsay, the ‘outspoken’ celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian.
The TV chef said it was “fundamentally important” for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. “Fruit and veg should be seasonal,” he said. “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu. I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown.”
The ‘I am’ does not want to see something and so thinks his views should be the force backed law of the land: the psychopathology of the expert that we so often see coming from doctors is at work again. The great unwashed must be forced to follow expert opinion, which means their opinion, naturally.
I like the idea of third world farmers pulling themselves out of poverty and selling me their products whenever I want to buy them and why should a loud mouthed self important chief and a bunch of fascistic green activists get to have a say in that? Their craving to impose their will on others should stop being socially acceptable and they need to be called authoritarian thugs to their faces.
One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life in Britain in 2051, a dystopia, showing what the country became when industrialism, liberty and associated individualism, modern technology, medicine, commerce and mass travel and communications were destroyed by a mixture of forces. Unlike the dystopias of Huxley which attacked modern technology, Clark’s dystopia very clearly shows that, with all its occasional shallowness and gaudiness, life as we now enjoy it is pretty wonderful and to turn our backs on it would be to miss things such as mass communications and information sources; techniques such as modern dentistry and keyhole surgery; cheap flights; fast, relatively safe transport, cuisine from around the world; downloadable music of any type available for a few cents, the prospect of DNA mapping to cure many diseases… the list rolls on. Our society is still pretty free, on the whole – though the losses of civil liberties and the associated nanny statist developments are a part of the trend towards a darker society that Clark writes about. But if you think, gentle reader, that Gordon Brown’s Britain is bad in certain respects, then Clark’s version is vastly worse still. He imagines a society, fractured into tiny tribal units lorded over by thugs and religious bigots, in which all these things and more are banished, loathed. His nightmare prediction is one of a world in which scientists, doctors, engineers and bankers are attacked, even murdered, for what they do. It is not a book to read if you are suffering from a bad depression and need a bit of cheering up.
A question that occurs to me about this book is that Clark seems to have written it with the partial object of satirising reactionary Greenery, religious fundamentalism and technophobia, hoping no doubt that the loathesomeness of the dystopia he presents will remind readers of the dangers of what the Greens/others have in store. My problem, though, is that other dystopian novels have often not had much of a salutary effect. As Perry of this parish remarked some time ago, our capacity for satire has been so sated by real-life lunacy that even a hit TV show called ‘Big Brother’, taking a line from Orwell’s 1984, does not inspire the same intended feelings of loathing that Orwell’s attack on totalitarianism was supposed to elicit. Fair enough, there are signs of a fightback against this trend.
But I wonder whether Clark is only really preaching to the converted. I hope not. I hope some stray Guardianista who thinks that John Gray or Bill McKibben are great sages will pick up this great little book and learn something from it. And for undecideds, I would hope that this dystopia warns them off from the anti-Enlightenment trend in which part of our society seems to be moving.
Perhaps a another way to think about winning arguments for technology, capitalism and so on is to portray positive fictional accounts of such things, rather than to portray the opposite. One way to win an argument to is be positive, to give examples of how things are improving, and improving the lives of millions of people. Grumpiness is not really a great sales pitch. Alas, avoiding the error of slipping into grumpiness is difficult when there is so much to be grumpy about, so it takes quite an effort to avoid it.
A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about how the UK drugmaker Shire was planning to relocate offshore to avoid paying UK tax. The FT reports today that a large number of blue-chip firms are looking at following suit.
The problem, however, is that even if the UK government cuts corporate taxes to entice firms not to leave, a high-spending administration like this one is likely to recoup any loss of revenue by hiking taxes elsewhere. If it does, that will only encourage more people to leave.
Pah. Not only do I know of French Basque cheeses, I have eaten them with cider in a bar in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port while two tables of Basques on either side of me got on with serious drinking song competition, and I am presently in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires (which reminds me oddly of the French concession of Shanghai – slightly urbane areas in two cities with wide, leafy streets that were in their heydays around the same time, I suspect) while I decide in which of the many wonderful parillas I am going to wash down my evening steak with Mendoza Malbec. Americans are such provincial wimps.
And I don’t go in for any of that “Good liberal while lingering over the Sunday New York Times” crap, either. It was just great burning so much carbon to get here.
Shane Greer reports on his attempt to get Westminster City Council to recycle business waste. It turns out that the council, while willing to collect his office’s waste, will not recycle any of that waste – and will fine him if he puts his waste in recycling facilities aimed at domestic users. That sounds awfully like punishing businesses that try to be green.
The problem with councils running recycling services is that they are inefficient and fail to innovate. They use outdated methods that are expensive, and end up recycling in the same way as British Leyland used to make Austin Minis (at a loss).
In large parts of Ireland, a recent report by Gordon Hector points out, the state has let the free market deal with refuse collection: individual customers choose from private companies and pay directly, rather than through council tax. Competition has meant that technologies and methods unknown in the UK have been deployed. Greyhound, one of Ireland’s larger waste companies, recycles 87% of the rubbish it receives (because recycling is good for its profits). The best-performing council in the UK only recycles 55% of waste; the lowest 11%.
This might not compute with environmental activists, but yet again we see that the free market is greener than state control.
– Update: On another brain-dead environmental issue, have a look what the council at Basingstoke is doing to destroy the local environment and harm taxpayers simultaneously, by pushing development into the beautiful Lodden Valley, instead of on the bod-standard land it already owns in Manydown.
Bill Emmott has a marvellously sane piece on food shortages, agriculture, the credit crisis and the case for GM crops. He’s in favour of GM, wants free trade, and is unimpressed by the case for biofuels.
The comment thread attached to Emmott’s article reveals considerable fear and hatred of GM foods. I would like to ask some of the commenters how they imagine most strains of wheat, barley, soybeans or rice that have been staples of diets for centuries came along. They are, albeit through trial and error over eons, just as ‘modified’ as a Monsanto crop. And that I think is the kicker: it is the speed of scientific change, not the change as such, that gives people the heeby-jeebies about genetic modification. I am not sure how that can be easily addressed without massive improvements in popular understanding of science.
It is wrong to make sweeping assumptions about certain media outlets. I came across what was actually a pretty decent defence of open borders and the benefits of allowing people to migrate between countries over at the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” site, which in my experience often has decent columns but absolutely gobsmackingly bad comment threads, particularly if the subject of the Middle East and specifically, Israel, comes up.
Phillipe Legrain has this pretty good argument in defence of immigration, challenging the recent House of Lords report on the subject. It revives a few of the points I also made here. In that Samizdata thread, one issue that came out in the comments was the idea, which is weird if you think about it, that residents who are lucky enough to be born in a country X are entitled to tell outsiders that they are not entitled to move around. Take the logic further: am I, a British citizen, entitled to ban my fellow Brits from moving abroad if such people are, say, incredibly skilled or rich? What right do I have to do this? (None). But if we are entitled to use some sort of “quality of life” consideration or economic calculus to say that we should ban or cap immigration, then does not the same argument cut the other way when it comes to emigrants?
I ask this question because, like a good classical liberal, what ultimately counts is liberty. The ability to get out of a country is a crucial check on the ability of the rulers of such places to act badly.
By the way, if you read the CiF thread linked to here, it is hard not to be depressed at the sheer, groaning economic illiteracy in evidence. As I keep stating, there is no argument against the influx of immigrants that cannot be used to advocate strict population controls, shorter working weeks to “create jobs”, and other lump-of-labour nonsense.
One caveat: Legrain makes a couple of bad points amid the good ones. He dismisses the House of Lords report on the grounds that it has some Tory members on the panel, such as Lord (Nigel) Lawson. Lawson is a pretty robust advocate of free trade and the descendant of immigrants himself, so Legrain made a cheap shot. Also, immigration may alleviate the coming pension problems by adding to the workforce, but ultimately, that problem will require a long-term rise in savings, and immigration is not a permanent fix for that.
Another writer who is good on the subject is Chris Dillow. He points out that if immigration is so terrible, why not take controls down to a local level, so that people in say, Essex are banned from moving to Hampshire, or Wales, or whatever? No doubt someone will claim this is a “straw man” argument, but it is not. If you believe national boundaries are in fact just lines on a map, then there are other lines, too.
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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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