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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A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist
Julian L. Simon
Transaction, 2002, hardback
This is a posthumously published work:
Julian Simon died suddenly and, according to the doctor’s report, instantly of his first and only heart attack on February 8th, 1998. He had just returned from a trip to Spain where he had been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Navarre. He was in very good spirits and showed no signs of fatigue or illness.
So runs the initial “Comment” by his widow, Rita J. Simon. I had wondered how he died, having learnt, with regret, the fact from the mention in a Laissez-Faire Books Catalogue, and even feared that, given his history of depression, he might have committed suicide, a fear justified by his admission in this book that he had contemplated doing so while in depression, being prevented by thoughts of his family responsibilities.
The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist, as the work is subtitled, had been finished, apparently over a year before, in a much longer form (900 pages – though whether they are equivalent to the page size of this 359 page book is not indicated) and has been edited by his widow, with acknowledged support. There may have been a misprint or two I have forgotten, but the only obvious textual fault is not filling in internal references to other chapters, which are left as 00, awaiting specification in the final revision. There is an unfulfilled promise of a bibliography of JLS’s publications in the text, but not even a normal list of previous titles at the beginning. His death date is not given on the reverse of the title page, with the usual guff there. All this said (at perhaps unnecessary length) I must say that the book is a very interesting one, less so perhaps for its ideas – these are in his other books – than for information on the personality of its author, though even here there is a possibly involuntary veil of reticence. I hasten to add that I don’t just mean about sex, a rather welcome exclusion, but rather why he feels dissatisfied with himself. He obviously had a happy marriage and his three children grew up satisfactorily (Ch 17); he had no money troubles and always did the job he liked or, if it wasn’t suitable, changed it.
Although his reassuring ideas about world resources and the environment had not gained widespread acceptance by the time he died, he does not seem to bear ill will to anyone. He may have thought that he didn’t manage his life effectively – but this would conflict with his propensity to work at whatever took his interest. This gives an episodic feel to about the first two thirds or so of the book; when is the action really going to start? → Continue reading: An Unconventional Economist who underestimated himself
A couple of weeks ago, non-resident Samizdatista Alice Bachini pointed to this Telegraph piece in praise of supermarkets in general and the Tesco chain in particular, which explains that supermarkets help us to save time and money, make life easier (particularly for women), and provide a tremendous range of stuff much easier to buy at all sorts of odd hours if necessary, that Tesco provide a fine online service for people who want it, and that all round these are really good things and should be applauded. (Oddly enough, my fellow Samizdatista Jonathan Pearce wrote a similar piece between my starting and finishing this piece). Now this is a good article – it even takes a brief time out to denounce the Common Agricultural policy as evil – and on the whole I couldn’t agree more. However, there is one important issue that the author (Alice Thomson) missed. Midway through the article, she says the following
Supermarkets are always accused of sacrificing quality for quantity. Actually, because they buy in bulk and have a rapid turnover, it often means that their fruit is fresher than their competitors’. At Tesco yesterday, I counted six varieties of autumn apples, four from Britain.
Because they have such huge buying power, they can also take a gamble on exotic produce. The old corner shops were great for a packet of cigarettes, but they’d never have sold fresh basil. Supermarkets have made us more rather than less adventurous.
The result is entirely true. Supermarkets today contain a great many more lines than was the case a couple of decades ago, particularly fresh foods. But she is wrong about the reason. The reason why supermarkets are able to provide so much better products is not about buying power. It is instead almost entirely about the benefits that have been obtained by supermarket chains developing complicated computer systems to handle their logistics.
I will return to this, but for now a digression into economics. → Continue reading: Why supermarkets are good, and what this has to do with the productivity paradox
A new Sainsbury’s supermarket has opened near where I live in Pimlico, central London. Very good it is indeed. Just about every food obtainable that I would ever want plus lots more. I made my first trip the other day and it triggered off some thoughts about what these big food chains represent in our culture.
First off, the customers looked genuinely excited, cheerful. It may seem weird that in an age of abundance where we take such things for granted, but the opening of this store seems to have created quite a buzz in the area, rather like the opening of a multi-plex cinema. Shopping for many people is an extension of leisure activity rather than just about the utilitarian business of buying food for the table.
The neo-Luddites in our midst claim to despise all this. Supermarkets, they say, force smaller shops out of business and these big stores’ buying power squeezes the margins of suppliers. To the first charge, I say that if small stores are indeed being forced under, it has more to do with the burdens of regulation and tax which necessarily weigh more heavily on small firms than on larger, more established ones. And secondly, the increased buying power of large stores is indeed a fact, but that also means the consumer gets to benefit. And a big store’s brand-name visibility means the owners of the business have to fret constantly – and they do – about product quality. Let’s face it, if you buy a tin of beans from Megastore Inc and it turns out to poisonous, then think multi-zillion quid lawsuit. If it is bought from Uncle Fred Cornershop, probably not.
And a final point. Supermarkets, it seems to me, have played a considerable part in the liberation of women from traditional household chores, and hence made it easier for women to leave the home and go into work. If we had no superstores and only small stores, then shoppinig would take much, much longer, and hence put even more of a strain on family life where most couples have to be earners out of financial necessity.
Of course the anti-globalistas are none too keen to focus on the essentially conservative, dare I say, reactionary nature of what their hatred of big business means. No reason for us to be shy, however.
Right, off to explore the wine counter.
With David Willetts blowing yet another unsolicited Kiss of Death into the rapidly fading twilight of the UK Conservative Party, it was interesting to hear Polly Toynbee say Willetts had been using the thoughts of our old friend, John Maynard Keynes, to push forward the increasing statism of his latest ideas, such as using coerced taxpayers’ money to subsidise working mothers.
No wonder Ms Toynbee has been so taken with Mr “Two Brains” Willetts’ recently published pamphlet. What it contains used to be called social engineering, of the most crude kind, but now it has been re-labelled as compassionate conservatism, and even arch-socialist Ms Toynbee has declared her guarded support. I therefore thought we’d better examine the roots of Mr Willett’s new philosophy, and get an Austrian view on the Keynesianism underlying it.
And what better place could we start than Mises.org? → Continue reading: Keynes, the Man
I would love to open a current account with the World Bank. Imagine having those portentious words printed all over your cheques. I wonder what rate of interest they would give me on my savings? Do they do mortgages? How about financial planning?
I would truly be tempted to make such enquiries were it not the fact that the ‘World Bank’ seem to regard themselves as being way above all that kind of vulgar, selfish, money-grubbing. Much better to channel their energies into pious waffle:
The real curse of world poverty is the lack of access to crucial services such as education and healthcare, the World Bank has warned.
Poverty is indeed a curse but it is a curse that can be so easily banished by the application of capitalism and property rights. Embrace those two pillars of civilisation and good education and healthcare will follow as naturally as night follows day.
One would have thought that, being ‘bankers’ and all, the paladins of the World Bank would know that. If they do, they are keeping it very quiet. I wonder why?
And I also wonder why they appear to be so obsessed with tradeable services such as education and healthcare? Is that because their true constituents are the Western bureaucrats who hold a monopoly control over just those services? I don’t suppose they would be at all interested in expanding their empires? No, of course not. Heaven forfend.
I don’t think that the World Bank is interested in offering me a savings account. Nor are they interested in ending world poverty. Not when the wealth and status of the privileged class they belong to is sustained on the back of it.
A couple of weeks ago I made a brief visit to Germany. As detailed on my personal blog, I at one point looked sadly across the river Oder, unhappy that I could not walk across the bridge into Poland, but unable to do so due to the requirement that people travelling on Australian passports (such as myself) require a visa to enter Poland. There is no good reason for preventing Australians from entering Poland without a visa – we don’t actually pose any kind of threat to their country – at least certainly not any more than Britons, Americans, or Frenchmen (all of who do not require visas), but none the less we are required to get them. Thus we enter the weird world of visa requirements, which has a lot to do with ridiculous bureaucracy, governments that are on the take, and wounded national pride, but very little to do with actual common sense and little to do with governments acting in ways that would most benefit their citizens. (I am here only discussing visa requirements for tourism and other short visits. The issues that come into play for longer and working visits are something I could write a book on, so I will ignore them for now).
In terms of immigration the world can normally be divided into two groups of countries: rich and poor. “Rich” consists of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU and other countries in Europe that either could have joined the EU but haven’t (ie Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) or are too small to do so (Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, etc), Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. “Poor” is everyone else. (There are a few countries in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe (for instance Malaysia, Chile, and Hungary) that have almost but not quite made it into “rich”, and heaven knows how you categorise South Africa).
If you come from a poor country, you generally need a visa to visit any other country, although sometimes exceptions are made for countries adjacent to where you live. If people are going backwards and forwards over a border all day long, bureaucratic obstacles become truly idiotic, and are sometimes removed. (Sometimes they are not. However, in the case I was dealing with – Poles visiting Germany – they have been removed). Generally, though, rich countries want to check out visitors from poor countries before they come. That’s tough. Travelling on a poor country passport is a nuisance.
On the other hand, if you have a passport from a “rich” country there is generally no good reason to stop you from travelling anywhere. Nobody actually wants to check you out. But, sometimes the government of the country you visit will require a visa of you anyway. There are two reasons for this. National pride, and simple extortion. → Continue reading: The weird and idiotic world of national visa requirements
Two problems in subdeveloped countries: dumping of subsidised argicultural produce in local markets which destroys local agriculture, and in Iraq, I am told the big bottleneck in getting electric power services restored is the looting of power cables.
I wonder how expensive this problem is in financial terms, we certainly know that power outages are a powerful symbol of the failings of the coalition forces. I wonder if we could employ one of the EU’s most wicked weapons for a good cause?
I propose the dumping of a massive copper wire mountain in Iraq and neighbouring countires. Basically troops should hand out 500 yards of copper wire to every Iraqi who asks for it, in exchange for the price of a cup of coffee. For reasons which would be obvious to any British healthcare user, there had better be a price, or demand will be unlimited. The result of such a Cable Dumping Plan would be the destruction of the black market in wire theft from power lines as there would be no effective market to sell the looted product: the looters would find undercutting the subsidized rates very hard. Even if all the looters start saving their coffee money to buy miles of cable, they are not disconnecting the power supply.
We are left with the problem of deliberate sabotage, but this can be solved by normal occupying power policing techniques. The equation is: political cost of failing to get the power working versus the economic cost of a cable dumping policy.
Eugene Volokh, the head Volokh Conspirator, has a thoughtful post on the conceptual validity of intellectual property.
Long, but worth a read if you are interested in the topic. I confess I haven’t fully digested it myself, but it seems pretty sound (his stuff generally is).
I will never again allow it to be said that reading the Guardian is a depressing experience. Not after reading the most eye-wateringly hilarious column in the entire history of British print journalism.
The alleged author (because there is a fair chance that he was invented for comic effect) is someone called ‘Subcomandante Marcos’. No, I kid you not. Go and check the link yourselves if you don’t believe me. Apparently he is the ‘is the leading voice of the Zapatista movement’ and not a character from a Woody Allen film at all.
Anyway, ‘El Subcomandante’ has a tub-thumping message for all us globalista gringos:
Brothers and sisters of Mexico and the world, who are gathered in Cancun in a mobilisation against neo-liberalism, greetings from the men, women, children and elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.
Hey, what about the transgendered?
It is an honour for us that, amid your meetings, agreements and mobilisations, you have found time and place to hear our words.
They must have told him this was going to be read out at a student sit-in.
The world movement against the globalisation of death and destruction is experiencing one of its brightest moments in Cancun today. Not far from where you are meeting, a handful of slaves to money are negotiating the ways and means of continuing the crime of globalisation.
Nuanced. Balanced. Sophisticated. Definitely food for thought.
The difference between them and all of us is not in the pockets of one or the other, although their pockets overflow with money while ours overflow with hope.
Mixed in with a dash of neurosis, a dollop of resentment and liberal sprinkling of schtoopidity.
No, the difference is not in the wallet, but in the heart. You and we have in our hearts a future to build. They only have the past which they want to repeat eternally. We have hope. They have death. We have liberty. They want to enslave us.
Dead slaves are no good to us. We want live ones.
That is what this is all about. It is war. A war against humanity. The globalisation of those who are above us is nothing more than a global machine that feeds on blood and defecates in dollars.
Stop laughing! I’ll have you know that the Guardian is a serious and highly-respected journal of record.
In the complex equation that turns death into money…
No, it’s very simple. You die and a gravedigger gets paid to bury you. What’s so complex about that?
…there is a group of humans who command a very low price in the global slaughterhouse.
Yes, Guardian journalists mostly.
We are the indigenous, the young, the women, the children, the elderly, the homosexuals, the migrants, all those who are different. That is to say, the immense majority of humanity.
But what about the rights of the monolithic minority? And you still haven’t included the transgendered. El Subcomandante is just a hate-speech spewing bigot.
This is a world war of the powerful who want to turn the planet into a private club that reserves the right to refuse admission. The exclusive luxury zone where they meet is a microcosm of their project for the planet, a complex of hotels, restaurants, and recreation zones protected by armies and police forces.
I’m booking myself a fortnight in Cancun right now. This isn’t a political statement, it’s a travel guide.
Brothers and sisters, there is dissent over the projects of globalisation all over the world. Those above, who globalise conformism, cynicism, stupidity, war, destruction and death. And those below who globalise rebellion, hope, creativity, intelligence, imagination, life, memory and the construction of a world that we can all fit in, a world with democracy, liberty and justice.
Question for El Subcomandante: if you have all the creativity, intelligence and imagination then how come ‘they’ are above and you are below? Comprendez?
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’ve been took, I’ve been had. This is actually a parody cooked up by some impish scribblers in the sub-editors department to catch the unwary and take some of their less regular readers for a ride. All I can say is, guys, well done. The trip was worth it.
Dot com. The phrase is synonymous with failure and self-delusion. But some people are making money out of the internet, even if it is only the city slickers who set up this deal.
Lastminute.com announced yesterday it had raised €103m (£74.6m) through a placing in convertible bonds which the online travel agent will use to continue its acquisition spree and develop products.
The rapidly expanding company said last month that it expects to post its first net profit by 2005. It has spent about £98m in the last two years on purchases, including the acquisition of the travel company Holiday Autos.
The bonds, which will mature in 2008, will convert into shares of Lastminute.com at 364.5p, 28 per cent more than Monday’s closing price, the company said in a statement.
Well I don’t know what all that means, but it sounds to me like someone reckons that lastminute is doing some real business.
My reaction to the story was to go myself to the lastminute.com website itself, which I’d never got around to doing before. A tenner for a theatre ticket? Hey, these guys are ticket touts! (Of the nice kind, who lost their bet.) I might have some of that myself, and then maybe I could write about it and double my theatre-going pleasure. Normally London theatre is nearer thirty quid, which is beyond what I’ll pay for something that only might be excellent.
The internet continues to work its economic magic. It isn’t just for give-it-away pulpiteers like us.
As mentioned by R. C. Dean in an earlier article, the fact that EU policy is a major contributor to poverty in the Third World is finally starting to attract the attention it deserves. Many of Samizdata.net’s contributors have written in the past about the true price of protectionism and just who pays it.
Well now the The Centre for the New Europe has released a devastating paper that shows the claims of the Euro-statist elite to care for the world’s ‘have-nots’ for what they are: complete lies
Key Findings
- 6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour.
- In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world – mainly in Africa – because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks.
- If Africa could increase its share of world trade by just one per cent, it would earn an additional £49 billion a year. This would be enough to lift 128 million people out of extreme poverty. The EU’s trade barriers are directly responsible for Africa’s inability to increase its trade and thus for keeping Africa in poverty.
- If the poorest countries as a whole could increase their share of world exports by five per cent, that would generate £248 billion or $350 billion, raising millions more out of extreme poverty.
The complete paper can be downloaded from the main CNE site
The Grauniad (of all papers) continues its libertarian crusade for free trade, slamming the EU’s continued protectionism of ag markets:
The European commission yesterday launched a ferocious attack on poor countries and development campaigners when it dismissed calls for big cuts in Europe’s farm protection regime as extreme demands couched in “cheap propaganda”.
In a move that threatens to shatter the fragile peace ahead of next week’s trade talks in Cancun, Mexico, Franz Fischler, the EU agriculture commissioner, said Brussels would strongly defend its farmers.
Note the condescending tone of the EUnik leading the charge on this one. Is it something they actually screen for? Is it in the water in Brussels?
“If I look at the recent extreme proposal co-sponsored by Brazil, China, India and others, I cannot help [getting] the impression that they are circling in a different orbit,” Mr Fischler reporters.
“If they want to do business, they should come back to mother earth. If they choose to continue their space odyssey they will not get the stars, they will not get the moon, they will end up with empty hands.”
Perhaps the big plus for free traders in all this is that this issue is not being posed as multinational corporations v. defenseless working class slobs (as antiglobalism is usually set up in the US), or as noble social democracies v. the evil capitalist US, but rather is put forth as poor and starving people v. coddled and protected industry.
Still, its a shame that it looks like the Doha round of negotiations will wither on the vine.
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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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