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]
|
Sir Bob “Make Poverty History” Geldof is getting the vapours over the fact that tickets for his various supposed poverty-relief events have been put up for sale on that symbol of dark, rampant capitalism, eBay. In particular, he seems all upset that a big corporation like eBay should make any money from such a highminded event.
Horsefeathers, is all I can say. eBay, in my view, contributes vastly more to the sum total of human happiness and welfare than that preening stage army of hasbeens, wannabees and well-intentioned nitwits that have clustered around Sir Bob. As has already been recounted in detail here, Sir Bob Geldof is a man of infuriating contradictions, able to talk with piercing clarity and lack of cant about the corruption of African governments and yet also willing and able to spout the cheap pieties that seem to accompany many a post-colonial guiltfest such as Live8.
If Africa’s economy were run with the same brio, dash and entrepreneurial brilliance of eBay, Sir Bob and his ilk would have to spend a little more time on what they supposedly do best.
UPDATE: thinking this through in the light of watching Geldof on the television, I can certainly applaud his desire to steer as much revenue to the poor of the world as possible but there seems no awareness on the part of the Live 8 crowd that what Africa needs is precisely the sort of business acumen of which eBay is a modern example.
UPDATE 1: eBay has blocked sales of such tickets on its pages, according to the BBC.
Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa’s President, says that the private sector is key to modern economic development in Africa. But, he says, African leaders and Western donors are holding it back. On the website of his organization, the South African Institute of International Affairs, he argues that:
foreign donors could play a more constructive role than they are doing at present through their current efforts to sustain the political elites and African states with budgetary support and the like.
Instead of giving more money to African governments, Mbeki says donors should providing the expertise to help establish independent financial institutions like credit unions and savings banks and help shield them from political elites.
Moreover, African governments need less power and the private sector more:
Africa’s private sector is predominantly made up of peasants and secondly, of subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Neither of these two groups have the complete freedom to operate in the market place because they are both politically dominated by others – non-producers who control the state. Herein lay the weakness of the private sector in Africa that explains its inability to become the engine of economic development. Africa’s private sector lacks political power and is therefore not free to operate to maximize its objectives. Above all, it is not free to decide what happens to its savings.
→ Continue reading: President Mbeki’s brother: only the private sector will make Africa rich
The decision to write off billions of dollars in debt for various Third World nations is in effect a subsidy for bad governance. Oh sure, the debt relief is tied to various conditions aimed at improving the kleptocratic ways that are the norm in the world’s various hellholes, but it is still just a way of saying that in the final analysis it is western taxpayers yet again who will be the ones picking up bill for the actions of various corrupt WaBenz bureaucrats.
And what of those poor nations who actually do repay their loans? What of those who keep corruption under control and who have a ruling class that does not see private businesses as a personal piggy bank to be raided as needed? What message is sent to them when they see the incompetent and corrupt rewarded with free money so that some celebrity activists can make economic illiterates feel good about themselves?
Which brings me to Geldof. I just cannot figure out this guy; on one hand he says self-evident sensible things like (emphasis added):
Bob Geldof admitted today no amount of aid to Africa could eradicate poverty on the continent while its Governments remain corrupt. The former singer was launching a 170-page compact summary of the Africa Commission’s report which will be presented to the G8 summit this July.
And the maverick Irishman repeated his call for ‘hundreds of thousands’ to converge on Edinburgh to coincide with the summit at Gleneagles. He said: “The issue governance is at the forefront of this compact. You can’t give aid to countries when they return it to us in debt payment, especially if you don’t allow them to trade with us. None of that will function unless there is a decent Government.”
But then says something as preposterous as:
Fears over corrupt African regimes should not be used to delay aid to the poverty-stricken continent, Bob Geldof said yesterday. Less than 48 hours after both Tony Blair and George W Bush insisted that corrupt regimes had to be tackled to ensure that aid was not wasted, the Live 8 organiser told them to “get off the corruption thing” and deliver the promised help.
So what is one to make of that? By his own admission, Africa’s appalling governance is a huge contributing factor to poverty and woe (not to mention the continent’s horrific record regarding civil liberties) yet we are urged to “get off the corruption thing”. So to use Geldof’s sort of language… what the fuck?
If governance is perhaps the single biggest factor (amongst several) that makes the Third World so damn poor, surely the Western taxpayers whose money Geldof is to keen to give away should indeed be asking if they really want their money to end up in someone else’s Swiss bank accounts via Kinshasa or Freetown.
Sadly for Africa, most of the things written about the causes and solutions of poverty in the Third World, or at least the articles that get serious column inches, are drivel by ‘celebrity activists’ who are ill-informed and arrogant in equal measure. A prime example being the mind numbingly ignorant Chris Martin for example, who thinks ‘shareholders’, the people who provide the capital to wealth creating businesses, which are the “great evil of this modern world” rather than, say, the governments of North Korea, Cuba and Burma. But then such folks do not concern themselves with actual benefits to poor people in various far off places but rather with pithy soundbites and causing emotional surges brought on by ‘doing something’, regardless of whether or not it actually improves anything for anyone other that a few Mercedes Benz dealers in sub-Saharan Africa and some portfolio managers in Zürich.
No, none of this really has anything to do with helping common people in the Third World.
Jonathan Wilde of the admirable libertarian group blog, Catallarchy, argues that poverty, rather than wealth, is “unnatural”, in as much as it is the stupidity of governments, rather than some ineradicable feature of our world, that prevents humans from attaining the opulence (to use that lovely 18th Century word) that we are capable of attaining in co-operation with our fellows.
I am not so sure that Wilde is entirely right. Is it only the state that has in the past blocked the path to wealth? Surely the lack of scientific knowledge, limited division of labour and so forth played a part in poverty.
Don’t misunderstand me – I think that Wilde makes a good point, but to say that wealth and happiness is the natural state of mankind begs as many questions as it may answer. All the more reason, of course, to ram home the fact that our capitalist civilisation should be regarded as a marvel to be celebrated and defended.
The usual collection of fabulously rich but economically illiterate show biz twits are going to assemble for Bob Geldof’s Live 8 event timed to coincide with the impending G8 conference in Scotland on 6-8 July. Now God knows lampooning rock ‘n’ roll’s A-list ‘idiocracy’ is fun and easy sport, but I must confess that I have always regarded Geldof as an intellectual cut above your typical gormless entertainer, so perhaps a closer look at what is going on is in order.
Live8 is going to be a freak show, that is for sure, surrounded by pro-poverty activists (by which I mean people who argue for a world structured in a way in which more people will be a great deal poorer) such as identity obsessed feminists, pro-Saddam communists, eco-luddites and all manner of other folks with very strange ideas about the nature of reality.
Yet unlike Live Aid, the objective of which was to raise money to mitigate a clear and present humanitarian disaster in Africa, Live 8 aims to raise political awareness on African poverty. Well that sounds like a splendid idea to me. Clearly the overwhelmingly largest cause of the destitution of large areas of sub-Saharan Africa is cause directly by corrupt African governments. So it would be fair to say that as the main obstacle to African prosperity and liberty is political, then the solution too will need to be political.
To his credit, Tony Blair has often said that it makes little sense to send aid money to corrupt regimes (which makes his infatuation with the UN all the more bizarre, given that it is an institution whose job it is to disburse money which mitigates the political cost of tyranny the world over) and so perhaps if the aim of Live8 is to work up support for the disintermediation of African government from the process of solving African problems, well, that is an idea I could certainly get behind, at least in principle.
Likewise I am all in favour of gathering political support for an end to all trade barriers that keep African products out of First World markets, empowering people at both ends of the trade relationship. Now this is something calculated to split the left in an interesting way as lefties who actually do care about doing something effective for the Third World inevitably succumb to the logic of Free Trade as opposed to the current system of subsidized Western agriculture and discriminated against Third World agriculture.
So it seems to me that although the din of idiotarian drum banging will be deafening, there is actually a fairly laudable message that might, just might, come out of this whole process. Perhaps it is time for some anti-idiotarian meme hacks? I certainly hope Bureaucrash are going to put in an appearance or two in Scotland…
And since we are on the subject of ‘Star Wars’ this evening, it appears that Our Glorious Leader has finally been seduced by the ‘Dork Side’:
They are the must-have fashion accessory for the socially aware – and now Tony Blair has got in on the craze.
Whether worn to highlight racism, cancer research or poverty, coloured bands are a familiar sight on the wrists of footballers and pop stars.
Now the prime minister has been photographed wearing a white Make Poverty History wristband during a trip to a hospital in Edgware, north London.
Perhaps he wants to be in a filmy-wilmy with Gwynnie and Braddie?
[Furthermore, for a polished and forensic debunking of this cloth-headed, celebrity-driven codswallop, I recommend Stephen Pollard]
Last week, my friend Jonathan Pearce made some observations on the impending takeover of the Manchester United football club by Malcolm Glazer. This led to a lengthy comments thread that I was going to add to, but the comment in question got a little long, so I thought I would turn it into a post. In particular, I wanted to address the key question, which is simply is there any way Mr Glazer can get enough revenue from the club to pay of the large debt that has been accrued, and if so, how.
As I see it there are two sources of value in the club that the present management is not presently allowed to exploit, and to make a success of his bid Glazer needs to gain control of at least one of them. One is that television rights are sold collectively, and as a consequence the share of television money that is going to Manchester United as not comensurate with their popularity and fan base. The other is that Asian and particularly Chinese television markets are not presently competitive and as a consequence Asian television companies are paying far less for the right to show football than the matches are actually worth. I will address these two issues in turn. → Continue reading: Some more thoughts on the Manchester United business
The United States has imposed new quotas on textile imports in order to protect American textiles manufacturers from competition. The move is bad news for American consumers and it is also bad news for the world’s poorest. Some of the blame must be apportioned to the campaigns of protectionists like Britain’s Christian Aid which have been claiming – incorrectly – that textiles liberalization is not in the interests of the poor. They have helped create a worldwide feeling of unease about the end of quotas.
The result is that America has now taken action, not to help producers in developing countries, but to protect uncompetitive American producers. America’s move is unwarranted and unjustified. The former European trade commissioner and future WTO boss, Pascal Lamy, has attacked the new quotas:
Mr. Lamy said that the global trade body [WTO] had been easing out the quota system over the last decade and that all countries had been given ample opportunity to prepare for the changes.
“It is not the law of the jungle, and the W.T.O. rules were clearly set,” he said. “Why are some politicians now not recognizing that fact?”
Fortunately, the new quotas will have to go by 2008. But in the meantime, America’s move means that developing countries will have worse jobs, less wealth creation and less trade. Is this really what Christian Aid was aiming for?
Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.
These are difficult times in Western car industry. The Economist magazine reports that dark clouds are gathering in parts of the world economy, pointing to a slowing of consumer spending, higher interest rates and large government budget deficits (facts which may start to really hit the re-elected UK Labour government). I hope the Economist is wrong since I have a mortgage to pay and bills to meet, but its arguments are quite convicing. And one possible harbinger of trouble right now is the car industry.
The recent demise of British carmmaker Rover is well known. Across the pond, however, two even bigger auto firms have hit trouble, and yet caused surprisingly scant news coverage outside the serious parts of the MsM and the business news pages: General Motors and Ford. GM and Ford have been downgraded to “junk” status by international credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. That means that as far as S&P is concerned, GM and Ford are risky debtors, and there is a relatively high chance that the rustbelt companies could default on their debt. The downgrade has sent shockwaves through the financial markets, forcing many big investors, like pension funds, to wonder about the wisdom of holding corporate bonds at all.
The problem may be confined to these firms. GM, for example, make a lot of the big SUVs that environmentalists get steamed about, and these monsters of the road are now proving more difficult to afford in a world of high oil prices. There is also a glut of cars on the world market and the industrial growth of China and India, and indeed of parts of Latin America, are a growing threat to GM and Ford’s home market.
Britain’s car industry has been through a torrid period since the 1960s, but even in the world’s largest economy, making cars is proving increasingly tough.
German’s leftwing SPD politicians have been bashing those symbols of hated capitalist activity, private equity buyout funds which look out for distressed firms, sell off some of the assets and reconstruct the remainder in the hope of turning a business around, before selling it at a profit. How shameful. Such people are “locusts” destroying Germany’s economy, scream the politicians (who of course have been doing a tremendous job on that score).
In fact, I find all this abuse rather encouraging. If entrepreneurs see value in the German economic landscape, and perceive there are rich profits to be made in turning around businesses and then flogging them off, it is very good news indeed for the country’s economy. By releasing capital from uneconomic areas and focussing it on lucrative new bits, the overall pie gets bigger, jobs get created, and productivity is also increased.
In fact, one could almost create a new economic law: the amount of abuse raining down on entrepreneurs is directly proportional to the good they do. I haven’t seen much reason to doubt this law yet.
Globalisation does funny things:
Former Baywatch star David Hasselhoff has been named international star of the year at the Bollywood movie awards in Atlantic City in the US.
He received the award because his shows, including Knight Rider, are among the most popular on Indian TV.
That is the BBC story. I also recommend this Reuters report on the event, which packs a lot of information into a small space. Such as, that:
Rani Mukherjee won the best actress award for her role “Hum Tum.”
What does Hum Tum mean? Is it a medical condition? Or is that the name of Rani Mukherjee’s character?
And I did not know that they have Bollywood awards in Atlantic City. What is that about?
Says Reuters:
The event was held in the old U.S. East Coast gambling resort of Atlantic City as part of Bollywood’s bid to be a global force in cinema.
Interesting. And I did not know this either:
Bollywood churns out around 1,000 movies a year but despite a fan base that extends to the Middle East, Europe and Asia, few movies make money and the industry is under financial pressure. Bollywood films have not had much commercial success in America.
But Shammi Kapoor, who was given a lifetime achievement award, said better technology was leading to more and better films. “They’re getting to be more topical,” he added. “They aren’t the happy, happy movies of yesteryear.”
Indians will soon be complaining that Bollywood is becoming a fifth column Frankenstein’s laboratory Trojan Horse turncoat snakepit of anti-Indianism that panders to the global market and apes its worst excesses.
This Friday, Michael Jennings will be doing my last-Friday-of-the-month talk, about China. Emergence of, economic miracle, impact on rest of world, and so on.
And, as if determined to assist me in my efforts to publicise this event, the European Union, in the person of Euro-Panjandrum Peter Mandelson, has been uttering anti-Chinese fatuities:
The European Union has called on China to reduce its clothing exports to Europe or else face enforced limits.
That was the warning given by EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, as he launched an EU probe into nine categories of Chinese textile exports.
Exports of certain Chinese clothing items to Europe have surged by more than 500% since an international quota system came to an end on 1 January.
Heaven forbid that the people of Europe should be allowed to buy really cheap clothes, as much as they want. Clearly this is a retrograde step, and must be resisted.
“Europe” still lectures places like China as if places like China are the Third World, and Europe, obviously, is the first. But this has a very eighteenth century Asia feel to it, to me. Europe can no more prevent itself being swamped by, flooded with, etc. (although “sold” would be a better word) cheap clothes now than Asia could then prevent the incoming tide of pots and pans, cups and plates, and shirts, made in what was then the English workshop of the world.
This nonsense seems all to be based on some Agreement that was signed a few years ago. And it perfectly illustrates the folly of such agreements, which serve only to allow the supposedly protected industries to remain somnolent for a few more precious years, thereby to lose all touch with economic reality beyond the protections behind which they briefly shelter, to the point where the pressure of economic reality becomes so immense that it is impossible to resist, at which point the protection collapses and economic melt-down duly happens.
It also illustrates Public Choice Theory rather nicely. You can be sure that hundreds of desperate European shirt and trouser makers are even now busily conspiring to explain that Mandelson is talking sense rather than nonsense. Meanwhile the people whom Mandelson is trying to harm (everyone else in Europe plus many thousands of poor workers in China) will be too busy with other things to object very loudly. After all, each of us will only suffer a bit, and anyway, what can any of us do if the EU/Peter Mandelson has decided to harm us all, a bit. That is not news. That is Euro-business as usual.
In due course, the benefits to all of us of free trade with China will be concentrated into the hands of a few illegal clothes importers. But the clothes will not be quite so good or quite so cheap.
Reuters reports on the Chinese response here. My thanks to Alex Singleton of the Globalization Institute for the links, via this, which continues to happen at the ungodly hour that was originally promised. Tim Worstall comments on the same story at the Globalization Institute blog, making similar points to mine about the concentration of the (temporary) benefits associated with protection, but the dispersed nature of the costs, and about how previous restrictions have only stored up trouble.
Meanwhile, how else is “Europe” responding to the menace of people working too hard? By having a law against it.
|
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.
|
