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.
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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.
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. March 10th, 2008 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
 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:
Tell me more:
Is anyone serious now interested in this, other than singularity prophets?
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?
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? March 4th, 2008 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.
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. March 3rd, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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? February 28th, 2008 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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’? February 26th, 2008 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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. February 25th, 2008 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. February 21st, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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 February 20th, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. February 18th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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 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:
However, those promises come from the BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto – in a section indistinguishable from the Green Party manifesto:
Perhaps this is why, according to the BNP:
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 February 13th, 2008 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every so often I have one of those ain’t-capitalism-grand? moments, and I just had another:
Flash memory being the kind of memory you can drop on the floor, and still get at. Here‘s the story that engadget is linking to. Yesterday, capitalism was great too. I finally got my hands on, and immediately bought, for a mere £220, one of these. Is the Eee PC about to be capitalism’s next triumph?, I asked back then. Definitely one of them, I would say. It has hardly any memory built in, certainly no nano-magic like that described above, but it does have an SD card slot, and it is very cute, and very small, and very light, yet very solid, and I love it. February 12th, 2008 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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