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]
|
Over on Little Green Footballs (also see link under ‘posh blogs’ section in sidebar), there is a lengthy series of entries in the comments section under an article about globalization and the people who are heading to New York to protest against it. Someone called Michele stated that she was “strongly against world trade”. This astonishing remark was something that had to be answered and so I will repeat my remarks here:
To be “strongly against world trade” is to be in favour of poverty and against free association. It is to favour force over choice. It is to favour death and famine in the third world. Anyone who actually wants for the peoples of South America, Africa and Asia to prosper should be demanding not an end to world trade but the removal of all barriers to entry to the US and EU markets. At a stroke that would result in cheaper products for common working western people as cheaper African, South American and Asian goods become available. Immediately the economies of third world nations would improve as they could sell their products without immoral grotesque discriminatory tariff barriers.
Also, as a laissez-faire capitalist libertarian, I am strongly opposed to the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF… these are institutions that support crony capitalism and big-government. They subsidise neo-national socialist stupidity like that in Argentina and despotic kleptocratic regimes across the globe.
I am in favour of true free association and therefore laissez-faire and true globalization. I reject collectivism in all its coercive left and right wing forms and the violence and poverty they always lead to. Individualism and laissez-faire capitalism without borders is the only moral option and the only option that can actually work at all in the long run.
World domination, it seems, is all the rage these days. If it isn’t self-immolating Islamic jihadists than its self-effacing Kofi Annan
And, once again, it looks like the US military that is taking the battle to the enemy in the shape of the formidable Colonel Oliver North who has rather brusquely told the United Nations exactly where they can stick their ‘Global Tax’
Clearly feeling the need to pick up the ball that was dropped by the Soviet Union, these posturing pompadours in cheap suits are working overtime to impose global wealth redistribution. Not to mention global equality, social justice, environmental protection and just about every other canard of a typical 1960’s student teach-in
Anyone who harbours misty-eyed romantic notions about the UN should disabuse themselves as a matter of the utmost urgency. It is not just an organisation that has long outlived its usefulness, it is the dystopic, despotic NWO-in-waiting
When George Bush has finished mopping up Al-Qaeda it might be prudent for him to unleash a few daisy-cutters on this lot. After all, it is always better to nip these things in the bud
Over on Live from the WTC, blogger Megan McArdle writes in favour of the abolition of taxation on corporate income. It is a good albeit lengthy article that is well worth reading.
And Megan, the truth is “When the revolution comes, she’ll be the first one with her back against soft silk sheets.” Forget the empty threats of the left, the future belongs to the radical evolutionaries.
I am in the process of moving, from my native Michigan to the western suburbs of Washington DC. When I closed on my current home in April 2000, I financed the loan at 7.75% apr for 30 years. I am currently qualified to borrow at 6.40% for 30 years. The yield on 30-year US treasury bonds has fallen by a similar amount.
Why do I bring this up? Remember, back in 2000, American politicians were talking up the surplus. Today, thanks to recession, a flat stock market and post-911 spending, the US will probably finish with a deficit in fiscal 2002. But according to a novel theory recently introduced by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, federal deficits cause mortgage rates to rise! So see, tax cuts would increase the deficit, which would increase mortgage rates, which would make new home purchases more expensive, which would hurt working families. Well then, if that is true, why is my lending rate so much more favorable now than it was when the US budget was solidly in the black?
The US does not finance much of its debt with 30 year bonds. In fact, the duration of the national debt (a fancy way of saying the average time to maturity) is just under 5 years. The federal treasury does not contribute very much to the demand for long-term funds. So it should not be surprising to learn that there is essentially no historical relationship between federal borrowing and mortgage rates. In fact, the US did not start to aggressively work down the duration of the debt until the Democrats and Treasury Secretary Rubin came into power!
If Daschle wants to pay down the debt, why would he want to do it in a period in which yields on long-term debt were falling? As anyone who stayed awake in finance 101 knows, prices and yields move in opposite directions, so lower yields mean that it would cost more to retire long-term debt from bondholder’ hands. This would amount to little more than a subsidy paid by US taxpayers to bondholders, who increasingly are foreign investors.
Politicians used to be smart enough to know that they aren’t very smart about economics. Senator Daschle evidently does not feel constrained by his ignorance.
Brian Linse has responded to my remarks, sort of, about capitalism and the reality of monopoly on AintNoBadDude, though he does not appear to have actually read the article I wrote, or if he did, he obviously did not understand it.
Speaking of Team Sami, Perry has a post on global capitalism or something… Ok, I’ll just admit that I have no idea what the fuck Perry is talking about. I think I may have inadvertantly triggered some primordial proto-libertarian confluence of meta-contextual rhetorical lilliputianisms when I mentioned turn of the century railroad monopolies. Or not. Anyway, just a reminder: E N R O N.
Brian’s obsession with Enron is revealed for what it is: political rather than economic.
My remarks were about the nature of markets and how the effect of regulations is often to cause the very problems they are intended to alleviate, such as monopoly and unsustainable bloated entities like Enron. One does not have to agree with my views but I think they were pretty easy to understand. But clearly Brian is only interested in how Enron’s collapse can be used to hurt the Republicans and thus his eyes glaze over when people like myself, who care nothing for either his precious Democrats nor his detested Republicans, wants to talk about economics.
Fine, no problem Brian. Feel free to continue to opine about Enron without having a clue how real world economics work if that is what excites you, but I think I will decline to get involved in that sort of ‘mass-debate’.
Brian Linse ponders the nature of monopoly and capitalism on his blog AintNoBadDude. Rather than answer him directly, I will give him my modern Austrian school economics influenced perspective on the nature of markets and monopoly.
The nature of modern capitalism is significantly different to that of, say, capitalism in the 19th century. The vastly enhanced flow of information and the global nature of enormous pools of fungible capital means that market mechanisms that worked sporadically in years past now work more smoothly and with tidal inevitability when allowed to. The larger the pool of possible market entrants and participants, the more liquid and inexorable the markets become.
Thus paradoxically, there is only one method by which monopoly and oligopoly can really occur for extended periods in a ‘harmful’ form, and that is in market niches protected from globalization. That is why Microsoft is so obviously only a transient ‘problem’ rather than a market ‘failure’ as its market position is not the result of adapting to regulation and protection. As big as Microsoft is, it is dwarfed by the pool of global capital looking for alternative uses. There is a good reason that in spite of its huge market share that MS products are really not that expensive. New entrants are impossible to keep out: if MS were to create ‘excessive’ profit margins, they would be quickly faced with hordes of new competitors as the software market does not require huge start up costs to enter. Thus the MS ‘monopoly’ is of little concern in reality. Apple products are actually more expensive and yet no one is accusing them of abusing a monopolist position. The reasons for that are not so hard to understand. In essence, the only way MS can remain a near monopoly is by not acting like a monopolist. Multi-billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt thought he was ‘bigger than the market’ and it ate him alive because he was trying to mess with a truly global commodity market. Bill Gates is under no such illusions.
It is ironic that left wingers and protectionist paleo-conservatives who fret about ‘monopolists’ are the same people who create the conditions for them to flourish by hampering the progress of continuing to globalize ownership, and by raising the cost of market entry with vast teetering towers of regulations designed to prevent precisely what they are in fact enabling. Capitalist ‘conspiracies’ that the left are so fond of fretting about inevitably come to nothing if the pool of capital and potential entrants is larger than the ‘clique of conspirators’ can in reality control, which in the case of truly global markets is the norm rather than the exception.
It is simple really… less, not more, public sending helps the economy. What is so hard to grasp about that? When the government taxes, it allocates resources in a way that would not have otherwise have occurred (and if it would have occurred like that, then why is that aspect of what government does being done by government at all?). If the government had not taken those resources and allocated them, the capital would not have just sat under a mattress… it would have gone elsewhere: that is what capital does.
So when the government proudly points to some wonderful things it has built and the alleged economic benefits they will bring, what you do not see is what that self same capital would have done if the state had not appropriated it from its previous owners… what they would have done, what they would have built.
So when Gerard Baker at the Financial Times says Bush may have harmed the US economy with his tax cuts, rather than saying he may have harmed the economy by not reducing spending, he is in effect saying that it is only deficits, rather than government spending itself, that hurts economies. By saying High-Tax-Tom Daschle has better economic policies, that must mean that government spending is actually better for an economy than private spending. How does that work? That must be why the many nations whose governments appropriate more of their national resources for spending are wealthier than the United States, you know, nations like…er…um…ah…
Tom Burroughes makes a great point with his new phrase, “False Market Fundamentalism Syndrome”. However, I think that for reasons of making it simple for the simpleton members of the press we should call it FMFS. It then sounds like a disease and we all know how the press like reporting on diseases, even ones that don’t necessarily exist. If it sounds nasty, press outlets like the BBC in the UK and CBS in the USA just on trying to be cutting edge in convincing the populace that absolutely nothing in life is safe.
Further the thoughts on ‘paleos’ of both left and right, it never ceases to amaze me to hear a senior politician make a pronouncement about how ordinary people feel about their freedom. It generally runs along the lines of; “they are too busy to be concerned with theoretical arguments about freedom. They are concerned with the money in their pocket, the state of the roads and public services.” The first time I heard this it amazed me to the core of my being.
Of course the general public has a lot to answer for, after all the natural reaction to almost anything is: “the government ought to do something.” It is critical for libertarians to counter this belief that the government is the answer to all problems. This suits statists of course since it is they who have been convincing the populace that the state is the answer to all their problems. Most depressing is that this belief pervades both the traditional left and right.
Andrew Ian Dodge
“What Sucks? Statism Sucks!“
A further example of “why-oh-why-are-we-not-able-to-return-to-1890?” type commentary from paleo-conservatives (small c, as this applies to card-carrying Labour supporters as well as Tories), appears in the Thursday, January 3 edition of the Times newspaper (UK). Written by David Selborne, a leftist historian with strong authortarian leanings, in The Tories’ future can be found in their past, he chides the Tories for their concerns with freedom and urges them to come full-on and support the public sector instead.
As an example of Bourbon-style learning nothing and forgetting nothing, this takes some beating. (Consider the vast erosion of civil liberties and the Common law in the UK over the past 20 years). Selbourne has a valid point in bemoaning the neglect of civil society (Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’), but like most statists misses the obvious point that it has been the growth of the state, such as the monopoly education system, that has wreaked so much havoc. The poor man accuses the Tories of imposing market disciplines on schools. If only that were the case! I think we should arrive at a new name to describe the habit among such folk of accusing X of precisely the very opposite of what they are doing. Call it “false market fundamentalism syndrome,” perhaps.
The value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas; and both these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent.
– Edward Gibbon
…when it was never actually operating in a free market? Over on AintNoBadDude, the indomitable Brian quotes part of an e-mail of mine but also takes the view regarding the Enron fiasco.
I still maintain my position that Enron is a failure of free markets, but I’m more concerned with the bad impression something like this leaves in people’s minds. If nothing much happens in the way of prosecution, the case for open markets will be harder to make in these industries.
Well I certainly agree that incidents like Enron crashing and burning does not help the case for free markets, but the reason for that is folks do not seem to understand that heavily regulated markets, whilst they are certainly a form of capitalism, they are in fact not free markets, they are (obviously) regulated markets.
Thus what Enron’s failure suggests is not that free markets do not work but rather regulating a market sector like energy in the way it is currently regulated is a failure. Here is a novel idea: how about actually completely deregulating the power sector (for starters) and make the market, er, free. What is the worst that can happen? Maybe Enron will go broke if subjected to the full force of market pressures… oh, I forgot, it already did.
California’s power industry provides us with another lovely example of what happens when heavily regulated markets are required to respond to dynamic circumstances… and it ain’t pretty. Either abandon the pretence that the market is ‘free’ and in effect nationalise the power sector, or let the market do what it does best and stay the hell out of the way. The alternative, like so many half way measures, is to get the worst of both worlds: bloated corporations who do not fully control their own businesses and who are also not fully vulnerable to more agile corporate predators and new market entrants.
Regulating fixed infrastructure sectors of an economy because they are said to either be ‘natural monopolies’ or because they are ‘strategic industries’ rather misses the point: they are actually not natural monopolies if you have a large (preferably global) market of power companies. Functioning fixed infrastructure for which there is a demand does not just vaporise if the owning company goes belly up in the fish tank… other people will most certainly leap into the breach and take over the assets (plus the associated revenue streams from users), hopefully at fire sale prices, and thus life goes on. That might not be the case in Nigeria or Romania or Myanmar, but in a sophisticated and well developed Western economy it most certainly is.
If it is indeed a ‘strategic’ industry, then why encourage a few fat sluggish players to develop who, if they cock things up, fall with rather a big crash (i.e. Enron). Surely it is better to allow full global competition to ensure no player can get so damn important.
Enron in the USA and RailTrack in the UK are two classic cases in point not of ‘free market failures’, but rather of regulated market failures. If all you have to do to make things work better is to impose layers of cunningly crafted regulations, then I suppose that explains the longevity of the Soviet Union and why China is the world’s wealthiest country… oops, sorry, wrong parallel universe.
Some people ask:
“Why shouldn’t our government keep out products from third world countries? We don’t owe them a living.
That is right, we don’t. What we owe to them, and to our own people too, is the ordinary right to buy and sell what they please, along with all the other ordinary rights to life and respect for property. Tariffs against African imports mean that we in Britain pay more than we ought and the people in Africa are arbitrarily forbidden from bringing their wares to our attention – it’s up to British individuals whether they buy or not.
So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via ‘Third World Aid’. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings.
|
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.
|
