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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[A blogapotamus]
Mr Speaker,
Income tax is an evil. It is an evil not because it is a tax, but because of the way it works.
First, it takes from the citizen the choice of how to spend his money. Indirect taxation, though often in the past tweaked to show the state’s displeasure at certain choices, still leaves you a choice; to spend or save, and whether to have booze, burgers or broccoli for lunch.
Second, it requires the tax authorities to enquire how you obtain your money and how you spend it. The existence of exemptions and allowances, of deductible business expenses, returns and taxes management is essential to the operation of a system that would widely be seen as unfair if it fell as heavily on the pauper, the producer, and the rentier drone. But the existence of allowances and schedules, and latterly tax-credits, means people rightly use their rights, and the Revenue is incentivised to regard everyone as a cheat, to treat careful self-management as a form of fraud, and press for more powers and more bureaucracy. The system becomes ever more complicated, by special pleading and anti-avoidance; the complication allows for ever closer investigation of personal affairs, ever more complicated and impenetrable forms, and ever harsher treatment of the negligent, confused or exhausted taxpayer.
The result tends to a system of brigandage, where the law of collection is as uncertain as the Tax Inspector’s patience, where the small taxpayer is as much prey as he has fat on him, and only someone rich enough to fight a case as far as the House of Lords will ever find out what the law is. Having made the travellers empty their pockets, the suspicious highwayman will resort to strip searches, then to probing body orifices. Anyone who has made tax or tax-credit returns for a few years has had a similar experience.
Third through PAYE and deduction at source, it takes and spends your money before you get it. You may never notice it has gone. And if you do, and your financial knowledge is small, you may not realise how much of it has gone, nor make the connection between your vanishing money and state spending. That makes it easy for tens of millions of people to believe that it is always someone else who is paying for political promises.
Yes, income taxation is great evil. It tends to destroy liberty, privacy, and personal responsibility.
It may come as a surprise to the House and the country, therefore, that I, as the first Samizdatista Chancellor, am proposing to increase the rate of personal income tax. → Continue reading: Playing the budget game
Hysterical Guardian readers are getting absurdly upset. The reason? A member of the Samizdata team suggested that a new tax on prestige cars was more about the politics of envy than saving the planet.
Michael Totten’s latest bloggage from Iraq is as informative as ever, but the thing that fascinated me most was a brief but interesting discursion into the use of the English word ‘Supermarket’ on a sign in a small town in Iraq.
What struck me about the sign on that store, and on many other stores in Iraq, was the English word “supermarket.” The only people in Saqlawiya who find English helpful are the Marines. And me.
I’ve seen this far beyond Iraq. Even in small towns in Libya – one of the most closed societies in the world – I found store signs in English. The amount of English in a genuinely cosmopolitan city like Beirut is even more striking, though no longer surprising. Beirut, at least, has a huge tourist industry. Imagine how differently you would think about Arabic civilization if small towns in Kansas and Nebraska – not to mention large cities like New York and Chicago – had storefront signs in the Arabic language even though no Arabs live there. Perhaps the word “imperialism” wouldn’t seem so much like a stretch. Of course no one forces Iraqis or Libyans to put English words on their signs, so it’s telling that they do so anyway, and that they did not choose Chinese or Russian.
I disagree with Michael’s use of the word ‘imperialism’ and I think he answers that point himself in the very next sentence. An even more demotic variation on the inexplicable prevalence of English puzzled me many years ago BB (Before Blogging). I spent some time in a few fairly rough parts of Croatia and one can hardly miss the prevalence of racist and sexist graffiti on the communist-era concrete tower blocks. The odd thing is that mixed in with the usually ‘Jebi Se’ varient epithets in Croatian, you will find floridly racist threats or extravagant anatomical references in more or less grammatically correct English. And this in an area that was not exactly a magnet for English speaking tourists, particularly in the middle of the then on-going war.
The huge number of people who speak English in Croatia can be easily explained by the ubiquity of satellite dishes, which is why I often referred to the local Croatian English dialect as MTV English. But that does not answer the question of why in a linguistically and ethnically homogeneous area (such as unlovely New Zagreb in Croatia or Saqlawiya in Iraq), people use written English when there is no commercial or political pressures to do so.
Interesting.
It sounds like one of those three decker jokes where part three brings you down to earth with a bump, which is presumably why it got written like that. Hedge your bet by hinting that the story could be all rubbish, and then tell it anyway. Because, maybe he’s right:
BOSTON – He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He predicted the explosive spread of the Internet and wireless access.
Now futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth’s people in 20 years.
There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs, he says, and the technology needed for collecting and storing it is about to emerge as the field of solar energy is going to advance exponentially in accordance with Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. That law yields a doubling of price performance in information technologies every year.
Tell me more:
… advances in technology are about to expand with the introduction of nano-engineered materials for solar panels, making them far more efficient, lighter and easier to install. …
Is anyone serious now interested in this, other than singularity prophets?
… Google has invested substantially in companies pioneering these approaches.
Okay, but I would have preferred an obscure venture capitalist with a boring name, rather than the overmighty corporation which is, for now, flavour of the decade, and which has, for now, more money than God, to the point where hundreds can have full-time jobs spending it, without making a visible dent in money mountain. How “substantially” has Google invested?
The reason why solar energy technologies will advance exponentially, Kurzweil said, is because it is an “information technology” (one for which we can measure the information content), and thereby subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns.
“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”
So, could any of this be true? If it is true, what follows, economically, politically etc.? Beyond the obvious in the shape of disconsolate arabs. Instapundit doesn’t have comments, but we do. My first thought: batteries for laptops and mobile phones are going to be replaced by infinitely powerful black patches on the outside (that’s already happened with calculators, has it not?). Second thought: will big black patches on the roof in due course be enough to power cars? Trains? Lorries? Airplanes? Spaceships?
Third thought: the greenies will absolutely hate this, because there’s nothing they hate so much as technical fixes to their precious and previously unfixable problems. Predictions for what they will say: “The sun is a finite resource! It is running out! Stop consuming Our Fragile Sun! …” And, suddenly they will fall in love with oil industry workers, because they won’t be needed any more.
But, first things first. Is it true?
At first I was going to put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day. It is a paragraph from a piece by Mark Leonard in the latest issue of Prospect, about Chinese think tanks. The Chinese intelligentsia have their left and right, it seems, just like us.
The new right was at the heart of China’s economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Zhang Weiying has a favourite allegory to explain these reforms. He tells a story about a village that relied on horses to conduct its chores. Over time, the village elders realised that the neighbouring village, which relied on zebras, was doing better. So after years of hailing the virtues of the horse, they decided to embrace the zebra. The only obstacle was converting the villagers who had been brainwashed over decades into worshipping the horse. The elders developed an ingenious plan. Every night, while the villagers slept, they painted black stripes on the white horses. When the villagers awoke the leaders reassured them that the animals were not really zebras, just the same old horses adorned with a few harmless stripes. After a long interval the village leaders began to replace the painted horses with real zebras. These prodigious animals transformed the village’s fortunes, increasing productivity and creating wealth all around. Only many years later – long after all the horses had been replaced with zebras and the village had benefited from many years of prosperity – did the elders summon the citizenry to proclaim that their community was a village of zebras, and that zebras were good and horses bad.
Nice story. But the problem, from the quote-of-the-day point of view, is that Zhang Weiying surely has the story upside down and entirely wrong. They did not start by painting stripes on horses. They introduced real zebras, but painted over the stripes and declared them to be horses just as usual. No change was occurring. No upheaval. It was still socialism. Only after the amazing production gains duly materialised were the authorities in a position to wash away the camouflage, and admit that the new and improved “horses” had been zebras all along. But – extra twist – the zebra stripes are still painted over. They still insist that they are horses.
Horse with stripes painted on them are what you introduce when you are trying to get rid of zebras.
There is a depressing article at Reason magazine about the protectionist instincts of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What the article does not tell us about much is whether McCain is much better (I honestly do not know, so I welcome comments about his voting record). And of course George W. Bush hardly made friends with Britain by slapping tariffs on steel imports – which also hurt American manufacturers and builders (but they lacked powerful friends in Congress). America is the largest economy in the world and despite what some of the more starry-eyed writers on China or the other ‘Brics’ might claim, is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Basically, America matters. If the country goes down a more protectionist path, it will hit the world economy in general. For all his many flaws, Bill Clinton’s signing of the NAFTA Treaty – admittedly when Congress was in Republican hands – was one of the few major achievements of his time in power. It has helped to fuel the ascent of the world economy, lifting millions into higher living standards: if any fans of trade restrictions out there want to contest that assertion, let them provide figures. Here are some official US ones that give some pretty punchy numbers.
As the title says, I wish they could all lose. I have had it with the media guff about how a McCain-Obama contest will somehow elevate American politics and ‘restore’ its image in the eyes of the world. What is the point of winning image points among the Guardian-reading classes if you pull a rug under the world’s economy through greater trade restrictions? How is that going to help America’s ‘image’, assuming that Americans could or should give a flying **** what people think of them in the first place?
The United Nations and the various NGOs which operate within its orbit, which naturally sees the world in terms of nation-states, regards statelessness as a ‘problem’ and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights include the phrase “everyone has the right to a nationality”.
Yet as the world becomes more cosmopolitan and globalised, the primary threats to security are themselves non-state based (such as radical Islam) and private trade without the intermediation of states has never been easier in the dawning age of virtualised networked economics. Could we one day see a time in which many see modern narrow concepts of nationality and ‘citizenship’ of any Westphalian style state as an imposition rather than a ‘right’?
Alex Singleton’s most recent posting here was on the subject of libertarians in the mainstream media, one in particular. Maybe that has some connection to the fact that Alex seems to be becoming a mainstream media person himself. A few days before that Samizdata piece about a fellow journalist, he did another Samizdata posting about Fairtrade beer, and he returned to the subject of Fairtrade, this time Fairtrade coffee (at the time of me writing this there is a problem with that link – hopefully it will soon work again), in a piece last Friday in one of the Telegraph blogs which he now regularly writes for. Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph (paper version and online) included a shorter version of that same piece. This was the bit (I’m quoting the longer Friday version) which I found most interesting, and most depressing:
Despite Fairtrade’s moral halo, there are other, more ethical forms of coffee available. Most Fairtrade coffee on sale in UK supermarkets and on the high street is roasted and packaged in Europe, principally in Belgium and Germany. This is unnecessary and retards development. Farmers working for Costa Rica’s Café Britt have been climbing the economic ladder by not just growing beans but by also doing all of the processing, roasting and packaging and branding themselves. Shipping unroasted green beans to Europe causes them to deteriorate, so not only is Café Britt doing far more to promote economic development than Fairtrade rivals, it is also creating better tasting coffee.
But Café Britt is not welcome on the Fairtrade scheme. Most of Café Britt’s farmers are self-employed small businesspeople who own the land they farm. This is wholly unacceptable to the rigid ideologues at FLO International, Fairtrade’s international certifiers, who will only accredit the farmers if they give up their small business status and join together into a co-operative. “It’s like outlawing private enterprise,” says Dan Cox, former head of the Speciality Coffee Association of America. …
Fairtrade is, in other words, a front organisation, crafted by unregenerate collectivists to con believers in nice capitalism to buy something which is neither nice nor capitalist. And the way to deal with cons is to expose them for what they are, so that only those who really do believe in the actual values being promoted here continue to support the thing. Telegraph commenters declared themselves angry and disillusioned, and congratulated Alex on a well-researched piece. I long ago stopped being angry about such people as those behind Fairtrade. I expect duplicity and destructiveness and inferior produce from this quarter. But I do congratulate Alex on a good piece of journalism, and on managing to get paid for doing it.
UPDATE: Patrick Crozier weighs in, quoting another commenter.
The Financial Times is very much the house journal of corporatist Britain; while not blind to the needs for a vigorously entrepreneurial culture, it tends to be hemmed in by a general acceptance of government and its hold on our lives. This headline says it all in the assumptions that underpin that newspaper:
“Boost for Darling as tax takings increase.”
Marvellous.
“Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required “little else…but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice.” But those three things were then – and are now – the three hardest things in the world to find. Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood. The Wealth of Nations is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn’t trying to change the roof’s mind about crushing us.”
– P.J. O’Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations.
O’Rourke’s book – a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket – is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O’Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland’s most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered – not always accurately – to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. He was not particularly fond of businessmen and some of his comments on the latter’s tendencies to collude smacked almost of that fear of big business that later spawned the madness known as anti-trust legislation in the US and elsewhere. He supported a version of the labour theory of value that was ultimately taken to its absurd conclusion by Marx; but Smith being Smith, he was the sort of man who also kind of understood that the value of something is what people will pay for it, nothing else. I suspect – although I cannot prove this – that Smith had the open kind of mind to accept the marginal-utility approach to understanding prices that eventually pounded the labour theory into dust (although not quickly enough to prevent the horrors of Communist economics). → Continue reading: Inquiring into Adam Smith
The inevitable has happened. The British government has nationalised Northern Rock, the stricken British mortgage lender and bank that got itself into terminal trouble last year as a result of its ambitious, nay, reckless policy of relying on funding itself through the short-term money market. When inter-bank rates spiked, as they did as a result of the credit crunch caused by the US sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Northern Rock suddenly found it impossible to go on funding its mortgage products. It was ruined.
As I have said several times before, the most logical, if painful step, would have been to let the company go bust; depositors would be protected if necessary, but otherwise, the company would be wound up. It would have been a painful, even traumatic example of how unwise lending policies can go unstuck. It would have served, for years to come, as a harsh reminder about the dangers of trying to run a bank without sufficient savings to back it up its lending. Instead, the government’s move to pick up the tab for Northern Rock’s problems will act, however marginally, to weaken the necessary harsh message that should come out of the Northern Rock fiasco.
Now, I know that Samizdata readers will not give a brass farthing about the EU angle, but a thought does occur to me, as it has to others: how on earth can the company be allowed to offer highly attractive savings rates, which are more attractive than those of some of its competitors, when Northern Rock is able to enjoy the status of a tax-funded company, when other, rival banks, such as Alliance & Leicester, are not? How, exactly, is the British government going to be able to square its actions with the single market of the EU?
Just asking.
Rob Johnston has produced a very interesting essay on the true soulmates of Green Politics in Britain
- Forbid the purchase of corner shops by migrants
- Stop people from inner cities moving to the countryside to protect traditional lifestyles
- Grant British citizenship only to children born here
- Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites
- Restrict tourism and immigration from outside Europe
- Prohibit embryo research
- Stop lorry movements on the Lord’s Day
- Require State approval for national sports teams to compete overseas
- Disconnect Britain from the European electricity grid
- Establish a “new order” between nations to resolve the world economic crisis
These are the policies of one of Britain’s most influential political parties: a party that has steadily increased its vote over the last decade; a party that appeals overwhelmingly to whites; and a party that shares significant objectives with neo-fascists and religious fundamentalists.
Perhaps – the BNP? Despite its attempts to appear modern and inclusive and the soothing talk in its 2005 General Election Manifesto, of “genuine ethnic and cultural diversity” [1].
Or UKIP? It harbours some pretty backward-looking individuals – but would they stop Britain buying electricity from France if necessary?
Or, maybe, the Conservatives? Could that be a list of recommendations from one of Dave’s lesser-known policy groups – chaired by the ghost of Enoch Powell – quietly shredded to avoid “re-contaminating the Brand”?
Actually, affiliates of the progressive consensus may be surprised to learn that all the reactionary policies in the first paragraph are from the Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (MfSS) or were adopted at the party’s Autumn Conference in Liverpool over the weekend of September 13-16, 2007 [2].
Of course, the Green Party will protest against the accusation of reactionary politics. However, in an article critical of the G8 leaders in June, George Monbiot, (capo di tutti capi of the green movement) advised readers to judge politicians for “what they do, not what they say”.
For example, as well as supporting ethnic and cultural diversity, the BNP says it accepts:
“… the right of law-abiding minorities, in our country because they or their ancestors came here legally, to remain here and to enjoy the full protection of the law against any form of harassment or hostility…” [3]
But, use Monbiot’s argument, disregard the rhetoric and look at what the rest of the BNP manifesto promises would actually do and it remains a party of racist and neo-fascist ideology – internationally isolationist and domestically reactionary.
The trouble for Greens is that their manifesto pledges would result in many of the same outcomes as the BNP programme.
You will not find the words “Boycott food grown by black farmers and subsidise crops grown by whites”, in the Green Party’s manifesto, but consider Monbiot’s advice about the effects of these policies:
“The Green Party recognises that subsidies are sometimes necessary to protect local, regional and national economies and the environment, and we will support them in these instances” [4].
“Controls such as tariff barriers and quotas should be gradually introduced on a national and/or regional bloc level, with the aim of allowing localities and countries to produce as much of their food, goods and services as they can themselves. Anything that cannot be provided nationally should be obtained from neighbouring countries, with long distance trade the very last resort” [5].
The paradox of arguing for Fair Trade while refusing to buy African vegetables because of “food miles” has been noted many times, but it is a paradox the Green Party simply ignores. According to the Guardian, Britain has two black farmers [6], so any policy to subsidise domestic produce and erect barriers to outsiders will, ipso facto, support white farmers and disadvantage black farmers. Even if supplies are “obtained from neighbouring countries”, white European farmers benefit at the expense of poor farmers in Africa and the developing world.
On agricultural policy in general, Greens will agree with the following sentiments:
“Britain’s farming industry will be encouraged to produce a much greater part of the nation’s need in food products. Priority will be switched from quantity to quality, as we move from competing in a global economy to maximum self-sufficiency for Britain, sustainable agriculture, decreased reliance on petro-chemical products and more organic production” [7].
However, those promises come from the BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto – in a section indistinguishable from the Green Party manifesto:
“To be able to fulfil all our basic food needs locally. To grow as many other products as we can to meet our basic needs (e.g. for textiles, fuel, paper) on a local or regional basis. To enable all communities to have access to land which can be used for growing for basic needs. To ensure that all growing systems use only natural, renewable inputs and that all organic waste outputs are able to be recycled back into the soil or water system” [8].
Perhaps this is why, according to the BNP:
“We are the only true ‘Green Party’ in Britain as only the BNP intends to end mass immigration into Britain and thereby remove at a stroke the need for an extra 4 million homes in the green belts of the South East and elsewhere, which are required to house the influx of 5 million immigrants expected to enter the country under present trends over the next twenty years” [9].
Greens agree with the BNP about migration and the green belt. They promise to: minimise the environmental degradation caused by migration; not allow increased net migration; and end the pressure on the Green Belt by reducing population and stopping growth-oriented development [10]. Reduction in non-white tourism and immigration would be an inevitable consequence of government restrictions on air travel. Few refugees from Iraq, Darfur, Zimbabwe manage to get all the way to Britain without a large carbon footprint, neither can tourists from beyond Europe. → Continue reading: Vote green – go blackshirt
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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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