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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Today I went for a wander around Camden in London, visiting Camden Market, Camden Lock and The Stables, contiguous areas filled to overflowing with small shops and open air stalls selling exotic Goth clothing, lampshades made out of old computer motherboards, Tibetan jackets, New Age crystals, Latex fetishware, fur-lined handcuffs, AC Milan supporters posters, weird furniture made out of tree stumps, flashing clothes with fibreoptic weaving, magic mushrooms to go, bongs, ‘No one knows I’m a Lesbian!’ tee-shirts, and food from West Africa, Morocco, Japan, Indonesia, Lebanon, Korea, Venezuela, France, Italy, China, Jamaica, Thailand, Holland, Scotland and even England.
The political content was endless racks of tee-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara, Bush=Hitler and McShit Hamburger logos and stands owned the Socialist Worker’s Party and various other fringe folk manned by quixotic and very earnest folks handing out “Bush is the biggest terrorist!” posters.
Now my guess is that 75% of the people who thronged around Camden (the crowds were dense over a very large area indeed) are more or less completely indifferent to those particular the messages and certainly 95% of the stalls and shops were not selling politically oriented things at all. Yet what was available was entirely of the left and almost all of it was either Communist (Che Guevara’s image was widely seen) and/or anti-American.
Right in the centre of the large shopping area called The Stables is a Cuban Restaurant called rather unambiguously The Cuban. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, I stuck my head inside as for all I knew the place was owned by some Cuban refugee who had fled Castro’s communist dictatorship. But no. The first thing I see is a large image of Che Guevara. The outside of the building has a sign saying this place brings “The Spirit of Havana in the heart of Camden”…
…which presumably means that criticizing the restaurant gets you dragged off to jail by uniformed thugs as that is truly the spirit of Havana.
Now if someone wants to portray a benign fantasy version of Cuba (“Castro chicken tenders!“), well that is entirely up to them. But the moment I see that Che image up on the walls, The Cuban takes a position on who ‘the good guys’ are and it becomes more than just a Cuban restaurant. Too harsh? Well imagine a German restaurant. Now put a picture of Himmler on the wall of that restaurant and suddenly the entire context of the place changes. I wonder how people would react to a Cambodian restaurant which offered a “Pol Pot Roast” or a “Killing Fields Kocktails!” whilst a smiling image of Pol Pot looked down on the gorging clientele. My goodness what fun that would be. Still, perhaps a closer examination of The Cuban’s menu may reveal such dishes as “Jailed Journalist Jambalyah” or “Dead Dissident Daquiris” whereupon my views of the place would have to change somewhat. I have not looked but somehow I doubt it.
But it got me pondering. I wonder how many of the anti-globalisation activists who probably regard areas like Camden as ‘home turf’ and perhaps even eat at The Cuban realise how the area only looks the way it does because of the global movement of goods within a market economy. Do they seriously think that there is a place like Camden anywhere in Cuba? Do they think the new Age crystals, the fetish shops, the Goth gear purveyors, the mountain bike shops and, hell, even the clothes they wear, the mobile phones they all carry, the iPods they listen to, would all be available in a politically directed command economy? Please, show me such a place.
The thing is, their own lifestyles and environments are examples of the benefits of what they profess to reject. Quite funny really if you think about it.
This “trade and cheap labour for manufacturing is the rich world exploiting the poor” argument is not precisely new to my ears. When I was a kid in the 1970s I heard the same thing about how we were taking advantage of poor world sweatshops. The only thing that has changed since then is the location of the sweatshops. In those days people talked about Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, those kinds of places. And what do these places have in common? Well, today they are the rich world. Ten years ago we started seeing “Made in China” on our cheap imports. A lot of this stuff then came from Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong. Well, today Shenzhen is for practical purposes a developed world city. The manufacturing has now moved inland. The process is getting faster, and the more of the world is rich, then it gets faster still for the rest.
– Michael Jennings, getting enraged at Christian Aid yesterday evening.
So that’s it then. As Mark Steyn says at the start of this, the surprise is how long it lasted.
Here is how this guy sees it:
Thanks to Patrick for spotting this, but only in the original immobile version.
Mark Steyn with an extended meditation in the Spectator on globalization. Just go read it, already. Its worth the registration and annoying pop-ups.
Paul Staines writes:
New data shows that the developing world’s share of global trade has surged to a 50-year peak. Rising oil and commodity prices coupled with vigorous global trade growth meant developing countries saw their share in world merchandise trade rise sharply in 2004 to 31%, the highest since 1950, according to WTO figures released this morning.
The data provides clear evidence that trade liberalisation continues to play a growing role in economic activity and is increasingly important for development and poverty alleviation. More countries are engaging in international trade and participating more actively in setting and negotiating trade rules.
Just like with India and Hong Kong, trade liberalisation is key to African prosperity. If we truly want to Make Poverty History, the world needs free trade – not protectionism.
I attended a one-day conference on the EU Constitution today, drawing together an eclectic mixture of people from all parts of the political spectrum, both British and foreign, and all united on the need to get a decisive No vote in the event that Mr Blair decides to hold a referendum on one (let’s pray it is not done by postal vote, god help us). I attended the morning session and drifted home for lunch with my head still ringing with one of the best speeches by a politician I have heard for years.
The politician’s name is Steve Radford and he is a Liberal Party councillor in England. His party is the bit that refused to merge with the old Social Democrats and decided to keep the flame of Gladstone, Richard Cobden and Joe Grimmond burning bright. Well, if Mr Radford’s performance was a guide, the Liberal Party is a very interesting outfit indeed. He denounced the European Union’s economic tariffs most effectively by holding up a bag of sugar and pointed out that the price of the bag is inflated fourfold by tariffs. He denounced the rampant corruption, cronyism and lack of democratic accountability of the EU, a situation which will get only worse if the EU Constitution becomes a fact. He was passionate in making the free market case – all too rare these days, and frequently very funny.
It is refreshing to hear an actual big-L Liberal refer to the anti-Corn Law League and the great campaign to promote free trade by the likes of Richard Cobden. I don’t know about all his views on other subjects, but if every member of the Liberal Party were like this man, I’d very seriously consider voting for it.
I hope we haven’t heard the last of this gentleman.
How long Economics in One Lesson has been available to read free, online, I have no idea, but since she only just heard about this, I feel entitled to say with similar lack of shame (unless of course a fellow Samizdatista has already flagged this up and I missed it) that her posting was how I finally found out about this myself.
It has been a while since I read this book. The bit I recall with the greatest vividness concerned the broken window fallacy. This fallacy says, fallaciously, that broken windows are good for the economy because they are good for the window-mending business. What the broken window fallacy neglects to mention is that broken windows are bad for all the businesses that the window mending money might have gone to instead, but now cannot.
The most extreme statement of this fallacy is the claim that the ultimate window breaker, war, is good for the economy, because that way lots of work is “created” in all the industries that subsequently set to work to repair the destruction. When Keynesian economics was in its pomp, you did hear people actually saying this. Maybe, if those are the kind of circles you still move in, you still do.
Yet war is creative, in a back-handed way, and provided that you lose. It destroys wealth, but it can also destroy certain impediments to future wealth creation. Mancur Olsen, in his book (alas not available on line so far as I know) The Rise and Decline of Nations (lots of five stars out of five reviews here), says that, yes of course, losing a war does destroy wealth, but that it also destroys what he calls “distributional coalitions”. In plainer language, losing a war breaks up politically well-connected rackets, like state-enforced cartels and trade-unions. Thus the post-WW2 economic miracles of Germany and Japan.
This is what you would call a high risk strategy for achieving economic dynamism. I mean, just for starters, be careful who you lose your war to. Pick the wrong country to surrender to and you are liable to end up with an even huger, politically even better connected racket, in the form of your rapacious conquerors. In other words, broken windows followed by more broken windows, and nobody ever mending them.
My good friends who run the Big Blog Company do not like to use Samizdata to promote the Big Blog Company as much as they might, because this is not cool. It is not good blogging practice. But I am only doing this incidentally when I link to the latest posting on their blog. My main purpose is to promote myself, which I suppose is not all that cool either, but there you go.
Said I, here:
A new market is chaotic, and (and this is the point) ignorant. People do not, e.g., know how to spot cowboy operators, or bad products made in all sincerity but badly. Ignorance and foolishness abound, and so to start with, down goes the graph of achievement. . . .
And, back from her tBBC promotional trip to LA, Jackie D said, this very morning, this:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their “big traffic,” fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody . . . who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients, and negative remarks about their competition.
That is a classic description of how a genuinely new market (as opposed to a made-to-sound-like-a-market governmental rearrangement of a non-market) starts out by working – i.e. not working.
Stay with it guys. In the long run, you will get rich. If you can still be there when the long run starts to run. Eventually all those corporations will start to really understand blogging, and to want help to do the real thing.
To continue my own quote:
. . . But then, if this really is a true market, things bottom out and start to improve and in the longer run the result is a market that is orders of magnitude better . . .
Or, to put it another way:
Anti-liberal NGOs like War on Want and the World Development Movement are using World Water Day (today) to campaign against private investment in water infrastructure. The World Development Movement says that water privatization is: “making it less likely that clean water will ever get to the poorest people.”
Unfortunately the World Development Movement is mistaken. As Global Growth’s development economist, Paul Staines, says (pdf file):
Practical and technological requirements for huge sanitation projects on a metropolis-wide scale require the resources of big enterprises to implement them, the private sector can not only provide the capability but also the capital required. 2 billion people thirst for clean water, Western antiglobalisation NGOs who arrogantly put their ideological interest ahead of the interests of the developing world are full of **it, and if they succeed in their campaign the fast growing cities of the developing world will be as well.
Private investment in water is expanding access to clean, running water. It contrasts strongly with nationalized water systems where politically-favoured groups receive below-cost water, starving off future investment so that unfavoured groups go without. Private investment offers the best plan for increasing access to water.
Crossposted from the Globalisation Institute Blog.
So, on the one hand, you have cheap microwave ovens from Szechuan province. Wonderful.
But, on the other hand, you get this:
The world’s first global health treaty – the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – comes into force on Sunday.
The anti-smoking pact has been signed by 168 countries, and ratified by 57 of them, which will now have to tighten their anti-tobacco laws.
Not so wonderful. Welcome to the globalized world.
My February last Friday has just ended, and it was definitely one of the better ones. Patrick Crozier spoke about libertarianism and private road ownership. Excellent talk, excellent discussion. The result of Patrick’s time writing for and bossing the now only archived Transport Blog, which he has now ended. (He now writes this.)
Among those present was Alex Singleton, and he naturally talked about his newly launched Globalization Institute, which, of course, has a new blog.
It occurs to me that you might expect the word itself, ‘globalisation’ (I prefer an ‘s’ in the middle there), to be the equivalent, at the global level, of ‘nationalisation’ at the national level. Yet, while nationalisation means the national government stealing things, globalisation means something quite different and much nicer. If globalisation was the same at the global level as nationalisation is at the national level, globalisation would mean a World Government stealing things.
Does this matter? Well, maybe it does, because we surely do need a word to describe the equivalent of nationalisation, but at the global level. I have been drinking and may have forgotten the obvious, but my impression is: we do not have such a word.
Surely the existence of the word ‘nationalisation’ made it far easier to oppose the thing itself. Not having a word for this other form of ‘globalisation’, predation by the government of the globe, makes it harder to oppose, I think.
Well it seems that today, short little link-pieces are okay, so here is a short little link piece, with links to these mealy-mouthed trimmers, arguing for a flat tax, and to me, arguing that mere flatness is not the point. Just having a flat roof to the graph is a hideous compromise. It must be flattened until it is zero-height roadkill. (Metaphor muddle there, but I hope you get the picture.) Seriously, this is one of my best diatribes (“THE TOP RATE OF INCOME TAX SHOULD BE CUT TO ZERO”) from my time as a Libertarian Alliance pulpit banger, and I recommend that you read the whole thing, even if it is only a .pdf.
When the world in due course sees the wisdom of this proposal and enacts in universally, the result will be that there will remain a top rate of income tax, but that whatever money you earn above the level at which the top rate of income tax kicks in, you keep. All of it. These flat-raters say that it should be fifteen percent or whatever for everything you earn. I say, once you have paid your share of the rent, you should keep the lot.
Sorry, I went on a bit there.
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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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