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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David Smith, the economics editor for the Sunday Times, has a splendid article on his personal blog, Economics UK, about why the Eurosceptic approach is the economically rational one.
Britain’s unemployment rate, on a comparable basis, is 4.8%, against 9.4% in France and 9.8% in Germany. Unemployment stands at under half the EU average. Per capita gross domestic product in Britain, according to a new report from Capital Economics, is higher at $30,200 (£16,440), than Germany’s $29,200 or France’s $28,500.
The economic momentum is with us. Britain has been growing continuously for 12 years, during which time other EU countries have suffered at least one recession and in some cases two. The sick man of Europe has made a remarkable recovery.
Of course the economic argument for Britain being in the EU (as opposed to some EFTA-like agreement) was always tosh. Switzerland anyone? It is now highly visible tosh.
Here on Samizdata.net we may decry the regulatory idiocy of the Labour government but clearly things are even worse in Euroland, and at least if more sovereignty is maintained at the UK level, more of the damage can be undone at the UK level rather than locked in by remote stasis oriented Europe wide institutions. All the EU has to offer is corruption, stagnation and regulation. No thanks.
I recommend this article about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
It reminds us here, if any of us need reminding, that even if we do manage to shake our country loose from the EU, there is still a ghastly alphabet soup of international organisations lying in wait for us.
Representing mostly high-tax European nations, the OECD thinks it is unfair when jobs and investment move from high-tax to low-tax nations. The bureaucrats are particularly upset that so-called tax havens provide a refuge for oppressed taxpayers from welfare states like France, Germany, and Sweden. As part of its anti-tax competition project, the OECD met in Berlin for a two-day conference during the first week of this month, hoping to bully tax havens into helping high-tax nations track and tax flight capital.
Using various threats, the OECD is pushing low-tax countries into providing information about nonresident investors to foreign tax authorities, meaning that any benefit of investing elsewhere disappears once European tax collectors can impose taxes on money invested outside their borders.
Acting as the Gambino family of the tax world, the OECD has pressured places like Anguilla and Panama to sign “commitment letters” pledging to participate in something called “information exchange” – an odd term for a one-way flow of data from “tax havens” to high-tax governments.
The writer of this, Joel Mowbray, focuses on the US contribution of $50 million per annum to this evil enterprise. But what this makes me think of is the fact that, following their recent electoral success, Britain’s UKIP is now being challenged by its enemies to work out some other policies, besides merely saying a big NO to the EU. And I say to such challengers, be careful what you wish for.
To think that I was one of those deeply ill-informed people who thought that ‘resistance’ was merely the the ratio of the potential difference across an electric component to the current passing through it.
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. I was so wrong:
RESISTANCE means saying no. No to contempt, arrogance and economic bullying. No to the new masters of the world: high finance, the countries of the G8, the Washington consensus, the dictatorship of the market and unchecked free trade. No to the quartet of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. No to hyper-production. To genetically modified crops. To permanent privatisations. To the relentless spread of the private sector. No to exclusion. No to sexism. No to social regression, poverty, inequality and the dismantling of the welfare state.
No to the abandonment of the South. No to the daily deaths of 30,000 poor children. No to the destruction of the environment. No to the military hegemony of a sole superpower. No to “preventive” war, to invasion, to terrorism and to attacks on civilians. No to racism, anti-semitism and islamophobia. No to draconian security measures. No to a police state mentality. No to dumbing-down. To censorship. To media lies. To manipulative media.
Resistance also means saying yes. Yes to solidarity between the six billion inhabitants of this planet. Yes to the rights of women. Yes to a renewed United Nations. Yes to a new Marshall plan to help Africa. Yes to the total elimination of illiteracy. Yes to an international campaign against a technology gap. Yes to an international moratorium that will preserve drinking water.
Yes also to generic medicines for all. To decisive action against Aids. To the preservation of minority cultures. And to the rights of indigenous peoples.
Yes to social and economic justice. And a less market-dominated Europe. Yes to the Porto Alegre Consensus. Yes to a Tobin tax that will benefit citizens. Yes to taxing arms sales. Yes to writing off the debt of the poor nations. Yes to banning tax havens.
To resist is to dream that another world is possible. And to help build it.
Got that? Good. Excellent. Carry on.
…3 days later than last year. The Adam Smith Institute has announced that this year’s Tax Freedom Day will be tomorrow, 30th May 2004.
The ASI calculates this every year, providing a useful measure of one of the ways in which the state reduces liberty, destroys wealth and lowers overall living standards.
As usual, Tax Freedom Day attracts quite a lot of media coverage from the usual suspects. I wonder if any voters are actually noticing?
I spent a couple of hours at Tokyo Narita airport yesterday morning, changing planes on the way back from Sydney to London. Like many geeks people, I like to check frequently to check my e-mail / check the news / see if anyone has insulted me in the Samizdata comments section, so I wandered around the terminal looking for an internet terminal on which to do so. Narita is well served with such terminals, so I was quickly satisfied.
What is interesting here is that there are internet terminals provided by two separate companies here. The ones on the left are provided by a local ISP, and users are charged ¥100 (about £0.50) for ten minutes of use. The ones to the right are provided by Intel, and are free to use. The photograph illustrates that the usage patterns are indeed what would be predicted by the laws of economics.
It is actually quite common now to find free internet terminals for use in airport terminals, particularly in airside transit lounges where passengers may spend a few hours between flights. This is a relatively simple and cheap amenity for airports to provide to their customers, so they do. Often though, the airport does not even need to provide it: some technology company will set it up for free, in the belief that the sorts of people changing planes at major airports are the sorts of people they want to advertise their services to. As well as free internet terminals provided by Intel, I have also seen free internet terminals provided by Yahoo at Tokyo airport. (I have seen free internet terminals provided by Samsung at Sydney airport which never seem to be working – probably not a good way for the company to advertise itself). The good thing at Tokyo is that they seem to be willing to allow competition between various organisations that want to set up such terminals, and they apparently don’t have to be free.
Which when you think about it makes a certain amount of sense. If you provide a good for less than the market price, access to the good will normally end up being regulated by queues and quotas (ie willingness to wait, and restrictions on the amount of the good you consume, regardless of how much you want) rather than by ability or willingness to pay for it. (The public health systems of the world, which are full of people waiting endlessly for medical care, are prime illustrations of this). In busy periods, queues are likely to form for the free terminals, and at that point people who really need to access the internet quickly are still likely to be able to do so if they are willing to spend money. And such people can then use the terminals for as long as they like, whereas time restrictions are normally placed on free terminals. (From this we can also conclude that the health system of Australia, in which people who are willing to pay more can jump the queues of the public system and have their healthcare done privately, is better than the situation in Canada, where private provision of healthcare is essentially illegal).
In practice though, I doubt the providers of the for pay terminals at Narita are making much money, simply because the provision of free terminals there is so good. Putting them behind security restricts their use to passengers, and therefore demand cannot grow in the way it does for many free goods. They may get some use at busy times, but I suspect not much. However, in certain other airports (for instance Singapore) where there are free terminals but not many of them, for pay terminals could (and do) also get a lot of use.
And in the case of healthcare, where demand is capable of growing completely out of hand if you eliminate price sensitivity completely, private provision that people pay for directly is the only way that anyone will end up with reasonable access to healthcare. Given that (unlike with free internet terminals) people are paying for the public health system out of their own taxes in the first place, the argument for eliminating most public health care and having proper price sensitivity from the start is pretty strong.
I think I smell another variant of the real-work-unreal-work fallacy. You know the one I mean. It said, a few centuries ago, that making real, edible food was real work, but fiddling about with bits of metal was unreal. Then when fiddling about with metal starting to move to faraway places, fiddling about with metal (especially if it was heavy enough or hot enough to do you serious damage if you mishandled it) was real, but shovelling paper this way and that was unreal.
But now, hear this, a comment from Neal of Margate on a BBC report about the rise in Britain of working at home, made possible by the rise of broadband. I have already commented on this report at my Education Blog, because it will surely make home education easier, but that is another story. Here is Neal of Margate:
This infuriating subject is back, is it? Please do tell me, how should dustmen work from home? Street sweepers, can they work from home? Factory workers? District nurses? Casualty department staff?
The only people who can work from home are those who do an unnecessary job. Can surgeons work from home? Ambulance drivers? Firemen? If you can work from home full time, you have a pointless job.
Maybe not, yet. (Although, give it a century or two …) But an offshore banker can work for the whole world from a West Indian island, on the beach, let alone at his mere home. But according to Neal, pure information manipulation counts for nothing. It has to be combined with, you know, doing something.
This Neal character has just got to be rabidly anti-capitalist. You couldn’t believe in the benefits of markets and of the division of labour and believe stuff as daft as this.
So, it is good to know that something as seemingly benign as some people being able to get a day’s work done without spending a couple of hours of what is left of the day stuck in traffic jams or crammed into metal tubes makes this particular anti-capitalist’s brain hurt.
Nigel Meek draws the attention of readers of the Libertarian Alliance Forum to this leader in yesterday’s Guardian. He is right to do so. It is short enough and good enough to be worth reproducing in full, which he does for LAF, and which I do for Samizdata now:
It is difficult to find anything in the European Union more perverse than its continuing subsidy of sugar. It fails every test miserably. It is economic madness since the EU is shelling out hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money – that could be used to reduce its growing budget deficit – to grow crops at a loss that could be better grown elsewhere. It is immoral because subsidies prevent poor countries from growing sugar that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. It is also unhealthy because it is encouraging the subsidised output of a product that the World Health Organisation, courageously – in view of the vested interests attacking it – says we should be cutting back on.
If the figures – published in a new Oxfam report, Dumping on the World, this week – were applied to any other industry, they would be laughed out of court. Oxfam claims the EU is spending €3.30 to export sugar worth €1, an almost unbelievable support of more than 300% – and that is only part of the elaborate welfare package bestowed on the industry. These hugely subsidised exports are dumped on developing countries, snuffing out potential economic growth that could enable them to work their way out of poverty. All they want is a level playing field. Is that too much to ask for? Oxfam – quoting World Bank figures – also claims that sugar costs 25 cents per pound weight to produce in the EU compared with 8 cents in India, 5.5 cents in Malawi and 4 cents in Brazil. The world price for raw sugar is 6 cents a pound. It is bizarre that European governments reconciled, albeit reluctantly, to call centres being subcontracted elsewhere will not let go of sugar output which, left to market forces, would long ago have migrated to the third world. Sugar producers, with twisted logic, use Brazil’s low cost of output as a reason for retaining subsidies on the grounds that it will not be really poor countries benefiting, only the medium poor.
The simplest solution would be to abolish all agriculture subsidies, even though it would, in the short term, hurt a minority of poor countries that might lose out to the likes of Brazil. Once exceptions are granted, then everything is up for grabs, and trade and talks would be dragged down by interminable bargaining. If complete abolition is deemed impracticable in the short term, then at the very least Europe should commit itself at once to the complete abolition of all export subsidies, direct and indirect. Apart from the huge relief it would bring to poor countries, it would also restore Europe’s long-lost moral leadership.
It would take more than one measure of this sort to “restore Europe’s long-lost moral leadership”, but if such an unattractive delusion is what it takes to get rid of these vile and murderous subsidies – yes murderous, because economic failure is a matter of life and death, especially when inflicted upon the very poor, then so be it. Apart from that, I see nothing here to disagree with.
I posted here last summer about this blog. It is still going strong, and the ideas embodied in it still seem to be having an impact.
A cynical attempt to reach out to the pro-free-trade blogosphere, which has to get a nod from the real operation, the Guardian itself, otherwise it just looks ridiculous? Maybe, but who cares? And I am sure that Mr kick-AAS means every word of it. Ancient proverb say: window dressing often take over shop. What matters is that this kind of thing is being said, right across the political spectrum.
One of the great things about blogging is that you can make a very small and modest point about a very large and immodest matter. Maybe X has something to do with Y, possibly. Maybe a large truth could be found by combining P and Q. I don’t know what that something is, nor what that large truth might be. I’m just saying: maybe something, maybe some truth.
In that spirit, and provoked by this article about the rights and wrongs of genetic cloning, may I offer the thought here that the elaborate and highly developed tradition of thinking associated with the notion that the central planning of a national or even a global economy is not such a good idea as it once seemed to intelligent people, because of … all the usual reasons that readers and writers here are familiar with, might have something to say about the wisdom, and in particular the unwisdom, of genetic engineering.
Michael J. Sandel senses that there is something dodgy about going beyond the elimination of specific genetically inherited badnesses, that is to say illnesses, and into the territory of genetically programmed goodnesses, in the form of such things as greatly enhanced musical ability or much stronger muscles. I think he may well be right. Genetic goodness may turn out to be a lot more tricky – a lot more problematic, as modern parlance has it, to induce than many perhaps now assume.
I have always thought that genetic engineering will enable us to learn a lot. I now suspect however, that much of what we learn will of the sort that goes: “Well, that we should not have done!”
This distinction between genetically induced badness and angenetically induced goodness reminds me strongly of the distinction, familiar to most of us here, between the idea that government is okay when it sticks to removing or restraining obvious badnesses from society, such as crimes or foreign aggressions, but a lot less okay when it moves into the territory of encouraging goodnesses, in the form of such things as economic success, and (the big one now) health (by which I mean “public” health, a general disposition to be healthy in the whole population). Encouraging goodness in individual human bodies and minds by genetic means seems to me likely to be a process which will turn out to be illuminated by rather similar intellectual categories.
In short, our books about political philosophy may turn out to be great not just on the subject of political philosophy, but also to have a great and rather unexpected future in the area of “genetic philosophy”.
Please do not misunderstand this as the claim that individuals do not have the right to genetically engineer their own genes. It is not that sort of statement. What I am getting at is that certain sorts of genetic alteration may prove to be extremely unwise, in the same kind of way that ‘positive’ planning of the economy has proved unwise. Economies are too complicated to be planned. Individual human bodies (and minds), I surmise, might, for genetic engineering purposes, prove similarly complex and intractable.
(As far as individual rights are concerned, one of the reasons I favour the right to genetically engineer is precisely to enable the world to discover the dangers of genetic engineering on a small scale, rather than on the kind of scale that might result from centralised government control of the process. Positive government planning, of societal goodness, plus genetic engineering done in a similarly optimistic spirit, strikes me as a uniquely toxic combination of policies, and “toxic” might not even be a metaphor there. The usual argument nowadays is that genetic engineering is too dangerous to be left to individuals. I say it may be too dangerous not to be.)
In my head, this is not even a half-baked idea. Insofar as it has merit, I am sure that others have had the same sort of idea. Insofar as it does not, I say in my defence: it was just a thought.
It is not often I quote Nikita Khrushchev in any context, but Al Qaeda is quite correct that western civilization poses a clear and present danger to their cherished notions of a universal social life centred on submission to God. An economically successful western civilisation underpinned by severalty and free intellectual enquiry is caustic to a civilisation based on the submission to non-rational ideas which are propagated by force. To put it bluntly, we will enervate them and eventually destroy them by gradual assimilation.
The best and brightest muslims are already hard pressed to not see the glaring practical and intellectual flaws in their societies and want better for themselves, and as a result there is already a small but fairly well integrated middle class of secularized American and Euro-Muslims who can be observed in the markets, cinemas, offices, pubs and bars of the west. But far more dangerous to the broader Islamist project is the example not of western thought but of western affluence and the ease and secular self-direction it yields.
The sheer material wealth of the more advanced west is almost guaranteed to subvert the broad masses who come in contact with it. The current difficulties in assimilating the lower parts of the socio-economic western muslim population should not blind us to the fact that western culture’s corrosive effects on the Islamic world view really counts far more when they are felt in Peshawar, Ankara and Cairo than in Marseilles, London and Chicago. In that theatre of the war of civilisations our truly effective weapons are not the gunship helicopters, laser guided bombs and 5.56mm small arms being used in Iraq right now, but rather our cheap DVD players, Internet connections, music/porn/action videos and smorgasbord of good, accessible but inexpensive Tex-Mex, Thai, Italian and Lebanese foods that globalisation has brought us, etc. etc. I have made this point before but as we concentrate on the more local and violent issues being resolved in the streets of Iraq, it does not hurt to put it all in the broader context within which our enemies certainly see things.
It is the horror of this viral characteristic of western consumer culture which really lies at the heart of the antipathy of the Islamists to the west: as secular society and severalty is the true heart of our civilisation, by our very nature we cannot and will not just ‘leave them alone’. It is not a matter of what western governments want to do, because western businesses and cultural influences will go wherever there are receptive markets and audiences. It is not a western ‘conspiracy’ to subvert Islam, merely the very nature of western civilisation at work. Short of turning the entire Islamic world into a hermit empire like North Korea writ large, the mullahs and ayatollahs cannot avoid their flocks hearing our siren songs.
Our weapons are varied and effective
How international trade works has always been a difficult sell for promoters of economics. Explaining Comparative Advantage is easy if you are holding a lecture, but less easy if you have only a sentence or two. I am reminded of the catchphrase of my economics teacher who would say: “Not everything in economics is intuitively obvious.”
This is unfortunate. Mercantilism – and the neo-mercantilism put forward today by many NGOs – is deeply damaging, especially to the world’s poorest who are “protected” by high import tariffs.
The current buzz-word in trade policy is “offshoring”. Many people in Britain and America think it bad for their country. Yet offshoring jobs is nothing new. It is merely the specific jobs that are moving abroad is different. In the past, the jobs moving abroad were always changing. There is nothing new now. And each time people campaigned against losing jobs to overseas countries, Britain and America kept on increasing the total number of jobs in their economies. Opponents of offshoring do not have the evidence of history on their side.
Further reading: Offshoring service jobs is advantageous
No doubt many readers of this site are of the libertarian persuasion after reading scholarly tomes by Ayn Rand, or Karl Popper.
Not me, though. I simply observed governments in action, and compared them to the workings of the free market.
One interesting thing I have observed over the years is that even governments who present themselves as ‘friends’ of the free market get the political urge to regulate, with the purest of motives, to ‘help’ the market along.
Markets aren’t like that, though. Even the best intentioned meddling by governments have consequences that are undesirable. Consider the Australian government’s well intentioned meddling in the Australian property market… → Continue reading: The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
It would appear from yesterday’s UK budget, before my accountant gets through the smallprint, that Gordon Brown has decided one million small UK businesses hold just too many awkward voters to browbeat in one go. So he has only smacked us with a light tap rather than the full hammer of state retribution he was muttering about earlier in the month.
There is still a Section 660 court case, with a judgement due in June, where he may yet succeed in fully wrecking the small business sector, just as he managed to do recently with the UK film industry, and the IT contractor sector several years ago, with his IR35 measure, but I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
What really puzzles me, however, is why whenever he deliberately introduces tax loopholes, to apparently encourage small businesses, instead of financial journalists just praising him in newspapers the damned small businesses actually take advantage of his faux largesse. Which means he has to get all moody and pompous before closing his own damned loopholes down again. → Continue reading: The cleverest man in the world
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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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