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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Anthony Batty asks if we really need the Competition Commission to promote competition between UK supermarkets.
In the news recently, the UK’s Competition Commission has been flexing its muscles in the area of supermarkets. Somerfield may have to sell stores, after buying what Morrson’s did not want after acquiring Safeway (a one-time subsidiary of the American supermarket company).
Do these people really feel that by virtue of the fact a supermarket has two stores within some arbitrary distance they have a monopoly? Or are able to raise prices and earn large profits? For starters the barriers to entry for say Iceland to open a new store are simply planning permission. If they feel customers would use the shop I am sure at least one of the major players would open up a store. Not to mention continuous competition from supermarket home delivery, local shops and the fact people may just drive another few miles if they do not like the selection they are offered. Supermarkets are one of the most competitive areas in the modern economy, if a company does not keep pace with the efficient supply chain, changing demand (such as the low carb craze that swept through the UK) it will find itself the target of a takeover bid, or in administration. This is not because of the work of government departments; rather it is the free market at work. Only through this competition can we find which stores give us what we want, at a price we are prepared to pay. If one firm is not performing we go elsewhere, if prices are too high we use an alternative retailer. There simply is no need for bureaucrats to be in charge.
I do agree however, with the basic premise of more competition. For this reason I find myself reverting to a point made by the late Screaming Lord Sutch, why is there only one Competition Commission? (In his day, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.) Surely in the interests of competition we should have several. By allowing new entrants and getting rid of the protected monopoly that exists at present, firms can choose between different conclusions and suggestions. Lower administration costs and fewer worries about whether or not an action will be allowed, means lower prices for consumers. In that way we will have free and fair trade, without the diktats that are not in the interests of firms or consumers.
It is easy, with all the terrible events going on in London at the moment, to let other significant stories slip under the radar. However, last week the UK senior finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, tweaked the rules of UK budget policy in an offhand manner that takes the breath away for sheer barefaced cheek.
Brown has a so-called “Golden Rule” that stipulates that the government’s books must be in balance over the course of the economic cycle. The books are currently seriously in the red at the moment, which would appear alarming given that we have had a relatively decent period of economic growth recently. So what does the gloomy Scot do? He shifts the year in which a key part of the economic cycle is supposed to have started by two years, the effect of which is supposed to show that the Golden Rule has not been broken. This sleight of hand produced fairly scant coverage outside the business sections, but in its own little way illustrates the utter contempt this government has for the financial markets, or the general public.
Brown has done this sort of thing before. And it makes one wonder just how long Brown can go on before the economy, supposedly Labour’s strongest card in the last election, turns south.
I never bought the argument that Brown was a great Chancellor, as, with all his faults, was Nigel Lawson, for example. Brown has been enormously lucky to inherit an economy left in fine fettle by the previous Conservative government, and apart from his wise move of making the Bank of England independent, has done precious little right since. He is an ardent meddler and micro-manager, making the tax code into a hideously complex morass that does precious little for growth apart from make lots of jobs for tax accountants.
How the world changes. A few weeks ago the political trainspotters were wondering how soon Brown would take over from Blair. I suspect the likelihood of that happening has been pushed away by quite a distance.
I attended the GI launch last night, and Alex Singleton turned me loose as the kind of semi-official photographer of the event, and has used some crowd shots I took, and also pictures I did of Bill Emmott and Alan Beattie (who is also quoted here).
Glad to be of use. But what really got my attention last night was the number of nice looking women who were present. Johnathan Pearce is fond of mentioning P. J. O’Rourke’s Law of Babes, or whatever it is called, which goes something like: Wheresoever the Babes are, there shall also the Action be. Tom Wolfe’s description of how the Babes managed to track down the men test flying jets in the top secret desert of western USA in the early 1950s, in The Right Stuff, is an earlier exposition of the same law.
Judged by this standard, the GI Institute is doing pretty well. Here are eight nice looking ladies, and one genuine baby type babe just for good luck, and because he/she was there. (Cranking out more of those being a lot of what this is all about, after all.)
And those are only the ones I got reasonably good photos of. I can recall at least two more ladies who only missed the cut because I did not get good photos of them. So if you are a fully certified Gorgeous Babe and you were there, please do not be offended. You just came out all blurry in all my photos, on account of my chin hanging down and hitting the focussing nob.
Click to get bigger pictures, some of which include extraneous males of the species. Cropping such photos is always a controversial matter.
The original Live Aid back in 1985 was something I supported. I watched it, gave them my money and continued to vote for Margaret Thatcher in the next election because, just like in Africa, extreme statism needed to be opposed in the country I lived in too. Back in those days the Tory party had at least some intellectual coherence.
Live Aid was a very specifically targeted project: there was a catastrophic famine in Ethiopia and regardless of the fact that it was the result of a war vastly exacerbating the effects of a drought, I felt at the time that specifically aiding civilians with emergency assistance was neither going to destroy the local economy (it had already collapsed to less that subsistence) nor would it significantly enrich the Marxists at the top who were in no small way responsible for that state of affairs. Most importantly, Live Aid was asking for private money, and as it was mine to give, I gave some.
This time things are rather different and far less straightforward. It is not all bad, mind you. The Live 8 extravaganza has quite a few people associated with it making demands for the developed world (of which Russia is not truly a member, it should be noted) to open their markets to the Third World… and this is rightly targeted at the G-8 leaders. Quite so. What the hellholes of the world need is more globalization, not less, if they are to lift themselves out of their dire conditions.
But alas the main thrust of what Live 8 seems to be about is to induce the governments of the G-8 to take money from their taxpayers and assign it to nebulous and frequently counter-productive projects in Africa, often in effect propping up the regimes who are the single biggest cause of their own nation’s problems and directly responsible for local poverty.
As with any large gathering of the music illiterati, coherence and cogency are going to be as rare as pelicans in Perthshire. Yet some of the people listening to the streams of babble at this event will come away with the simple idea lodged in their brains that making trade freer is one of those things that would make the world a better place. So whilst I have no interest in supporting Live 8 myself and I had better things to do than watch it yesterday, perhaps some good will come from it in spite of the toxic statist message at this event’s core.
Next time you see a starving African child on the television, remember the culpability of Make Poverty History. MPH’s will cause more poverty and more deaths than would otherwise have occurred.
Socialism is killing the third world and Make Poverty History is going to make it worse. In a report by the Globalization Institute called More Aid, Less Growth, we learn that “for every 1% increase in aid received by a developing country, there is a 3.65% drop in real GDP growth per person. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the aid industry, the study finds that even where recipients have good governance, the effect is also negative.”
So there you have it. The increase in aid prompted by Make Poverty History is going make things worse, not better.
At Hyde Park, Dido just introduced as the “African Ambassador for Music from Senegal”, Youssou N’Dour*, who she was “in awe” of, “not just because he has a wonderful voice, but because of his wonderful beliefs”. He came on stage to say:
“The debt cancellation is OK. The aid is OK. But, please, open your markets.”
There will be an awful lot of well-intentioned nonsense given unquestioning, reverential coverage today, with ignorance and platitudes dressed up as profundity. Maybe, however, for perhaps the first time at an event of this type and on this scale, a kernel of truth will wriggle its way onto TV.
I consider this a small but notable victory for the notion that, if you permit free speech and are prepared to tolerate every misguided and moronic idea, eventually the truth will out.
* [edit]: add correct spelling and link.
I have already mentioned the guy’s robust views about the upcoming Live8 musical event about to hit central London and I make no apologies for following up by plugging a fine book by Richard D. North in which he defends affluence and modern industrial society in his book, Rich Is Beautiful. Written in a deliberately provocative tone of voice, North crushes one modern shibboleth after another in a style reminiscent of a British P.J. O’Rourke. First class.
It is good to see that some dissenting voices are being heard amidst the babble that is surrounding the G8 event.
I find it interesting to see that a moderate voice for the free market like Alex Singleton (who, unlike me, supports Third World debt cancellation) is being attacked by a neo-communist who describe him as a ‘dangerous extremist’, even though Alex’s views on these particular issues are little different from the Department for International Development or that paragon of Thatcherite virtues, Clare Short. Well who knows, perhaps some of Alex’s critics have pecuniary ties to large pharmaceutical companies? It is amazing the enemies you make when you stand up for free trade and against vested interests.
Alex is a splendid chap but frankly I do not find him nearly extreme enough when it comes to Africa, but perhaps that is my job.
Richard B. North has a terrific set of articles about the current focus on Africa, debt-relief and poverty brought about partly by the efforts of Sir Bob “keep it off eBay” Geldof. It is fair to summarise that North is not totally blown away with admiration by the scruffy former lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, or indeed with the grandstanding of our own wonderful PM, Tony Blair.
Definitely not the sort of articles one would expect to get on a college degree reading list. How I wish the weblog existed when studying for my degree back in the 80s.
“I think that maybe – just maybe – anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can’t have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.”
– The always good American blogger Radley Balko, telling it like it is.
It was written as…
The US taxman, the internal revenue service, argues that KPMG’s tax shelters between 1996 and 2002 cost the government $1.4bn in lost revenues.
But I prefer to see it as… “KPMG’s tax shelters between 1996 and 2002 saved the public $1.4bn which was used to generate productive economic activity”
As I remarked in my previous post, Sir Bob Geldof is an annoying gentleman but capable of moments of lucidity. (I was a bit rude about him in my previous post. Sorry Bob). As an act of charity to the fellow, here is a quotation he might like to ponder:
“I see in the free trade principle that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe- drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creeds and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace… I believe the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires and gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labor with his brother Man.”
Those words were uttered by Richard Cobden about 150 years ago, a man who saw a congruence between the ideals of personal liberty, concern for the welfare of one’s fellows, and the free market order. For him, like his great Victorian contemporaries like Sir Robert Peel, free trade was a progressive cause to be championed in the interests of the little guy, and not the cause of big powerful interests. It is a message that urgently needs to be understood by those who, no doubt from fine motives in a few cases, rail against global capitalism.
If the case for the free market is to be more widely advanced, we have to appeal to the sense of idealism and concern for the downtrodden that animated our ancestors and could still appeal to the decent folk on the left. It is worth a try, anyway.
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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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