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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Grim news from South Africa. Just in case anyone thought that the departure of President Zuma, a corrupt man who has stripped his country (South Africa faces severe water shortages brought on by neglect of infrastructure) might lead to better things will be disappointed. The new regime has signed off on a land-grab policy of confiscating white-owned land without compensation. (About 70 per cent of South African farmland is owned by whites.) The claim made is that any white person who owns land in the country must, by definition, have stolen it. (The idea that such ownership might have come into being without theft just does not cross certain persons’ minds. That fact is simply undiscussible.)
As we have found in the seizure/collectivisation of farms in the former Soviet Union, in China, and in Zimbabwe more recently, such moves herald mass poverty and violence. South Africa has ironically seen an influx of poor Zimbabweans since the vile Mugabe regime started to attack white farmers and seize land; the country has suffered a catastrophic decline in its farmland output, which may never recover. South Africa seems keen to follow suit; it has a range of largely self-inflicted woes: the current government is deeply corrupt. The country needs inward investment – seizing white-owned property hardly encourages any investor, of any racial background. As a matter of simple common sense, taking land by brute force, without compensation, from owners and giving it to those who are political cronies and hangers-on will inevitably reduce output and wealth, not the other way round.
The unfolding of South Africa’s history is a tragedy, and it is easy to see why there is an element of “score-settling” at work here. Apartheid, let it not be forgotten, was introduced in the late 1940s at the behest to some degree of the white trade union movement, keen to bolster its bargaining power. Even if you were a private entrepreneur who wanted to hire non-whites for certain jobs, for example, you couldn’t. (Minimum wage laws operated in ways that hurt, not helped, non-whites.) The system was as absurd and vile as the Jim Crow laws of the US, or other examples of serfdom and oppression down the ages. It had to go; for anyone who supports a free market economy, apartheid and its cousins are absurd as well as wrong.
But the solution of seizing white-owned land, regardless of the honesty or provenance of it, and giving it to people via a political carve-up, turns the injustices inherited from the old regime on their head, creating a new form of racism. Two wrongs do not make a right. And further, one suspects that the land seizures are an attempt to deflect attention from the failings of the existing regime. Compare and contrast how, for example, the “Asian tigers” threw off their old colonial masters and focused on getting seriously rich, not least by respecting property rights. And wherever one looks, there does seem a pretty tight correlation between respect for property rights – indeed their very existence – with prosperity and happiness more broadly. Hernando de Soto has made something of a career pushing the point that the world needs more property rights, spread among more people. (Check out this recent lecture by Niall Ferguson on the same sort of issue.) As an aside, it also seems to be a pretty solid marker of respect for property rights to have a large and growing middle class. I suspect that one of the underlying problems in South Africa is that among the non-white population, persons who can be so described aren’t a big portion of the total.
Lest anyone pounces on the notion that what has happened proves that certain racial groups are incapable of building a civilized political order, bear in mind that here in the UK, the oh-so-white Caucasian leadership of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, and his colleagues, want to do to the owners of privately-owned industries such as electricity, gas, and the rest what the new leadership in South Africa wants to do to white farmers. The defence of settled property rights remains a vital cause for anyone interested not just in prosperity, but liberty. As of this week, that cause took a turn for the worse in South Africa.
Thus saith the EQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION to its anointed, to the BBC, whose right hand it hath holden, to subdue the unrighteous before it:
Employers still have ‘antiquated attitude to female workers’
Many employers still live in the “dark ages” when it comes to recruiting women, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) says.
In a poll for the EHRC, 36% of employers thought it reasonable to ask a women about plans to have children.
Some 59% agreed that a woman should have to disclose during the recruitment process whether she is pregnant.
The commission said the poll of 1,106 male and female decision-makers showed worrying attitudes.
The EHRC said its study showed that many employers needed more support to better understand the basics of discrimination law and the rights of pregnant women and new mothers.
EHRC chief executive Rebecca Hilsenrath said: “It is a depressing reality that, when it comes the rights of pregnant woman and new mothers in the workplace, we are still living in the dark ages.
“We should all know very well that it is against the law not to appoint a woman because she is pregnant or might become pregnant.
“Yet we also know women routinely get asked questions around family planning in interviews.”
Other findings from the YouGov survey of small, medium and large firms included:
– 46% of employers agreed it was reasonable to ask women if they have young children during the recruitment process
– 44% agree women should work for an organisation for at least a year before deciding to have children
About one third believe that women who become pregnant and new mothers in work are “generally less interested in career progression”
– 41% of employers agreed that pregnancy in the workplace puts “an unnecessary cost burden” on the workplace
– 51% agree there is sometimes resentment towards women who are pregnant or on maternity leave
The EHRC said its survey revealed antiquated beliefs, including two out of five employers saying women who have had more than one child while in the same job can be a “burden” to their team.
I asked my friends how they’d voted last year. Sanjit’s a Tory, but hard-working Annie and Marion, highly trained and usefully employed, said “Labour” without a pause for reflection. I wasn’t surprised, but I am fearful. Think what they’ll do when their generation puts a Marxist like Corbyn into power, eyeing up those assets we prize, those homes we once took for granted. What would be your instinct, if you’d never been able to buy a house, while the generation above you were getting richer by £35 a day, just by sitting in the home they refuse to let you afford?
– Graham Archer.
The issue of the housing supply/demand problem has been noted several times before here at Samizdata, such as here, here and here.
Next time you hear someone talking about the triumph of ‘neo-liberalism’, or the prevalence of free markets, remind them that the financial markets have been explicitly state-dependent for a decade. And this is not some unintended policy side-effect. The central banks got what they wanted. They hoped to push up financial asset prices, both to keep borrowing costs down – financial prices and interest rates generally move in inverse directions – as well as to make people and institutions feel wealthier in the hope they would spend more. It’s proved much easier to stimulate financial wealth than it is to help bring about real new wealth creation through producing more goods and services efficiently.
– Phil Mullan
In a recent comedy routine, Chappelle provided a succinct explanation of why it makes more sense for the United States to import some goods from China rather than try to pursue a protectionist trade policy aimed at producing everything domestically. Chappelle summarized President Trump’s position vis-à-vis China: “I’m gonna go to China, and I’m gonna get these jobs from China and bring ‘em back to America.” Chappelle then interrupted his Trump soliloquy, asking: “For what, so iPhones can be $9,000? Leave that job in China where it belongs … I wanna wear Nikes, I don’t wanna make those things. Stop trying to give us Chinese jobs.”
– Allan Golombek
Last night, Elon Musk mentioned that the development cost of Falcon Heavy was about $500M, an astonishing sum, until you remember that NASA’s new Space Launch System has consumed about $20B to date and isn’t finished yet. Full development costs for SLS are said to be $35B.
Also, while Falcon Heavy re-uses most of its hardware and costs about $90M a flight, the current quoted SLS flight cost is $500M, and more realistically might reach $1B per flight.
However, while Falcon Heavy can only carry 63 tons to low earth orbit, SLS Block 1 will be able to carry 70 tons.
Eventually, SLS Block 2 will be available, with a payload of 130 tons to LEO. By that time, SpaceX’s BFR, which will be fully reusable, may be in flight. BFR will be able to carry 150 tons to LEO, and is intended to be fully reusable, so a flight may cost as little as a few million dollars — likely under 1/100th of the cost of a flight of SLS Block 2.
IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad has has died. Evidence suggests that in his youth, Mr Kamprad was a Nazi. I don’t mean this in any metaphorical sense. He appears to have been an actual Nazi.
Mr Kamprad then went on to conquer the world through selling people flat pack furniture. Rather than the other way.
Mercantilists literally believe (even when they deny the belief) that money is wealth – that to accumulate money is to accumulate wealth and that to spend money is to become less wealthy. This mercantilist “reasoning” is why, for example, mercantilists applaud exports (because exports are sold for money) and lament imports (because imports are paid for with money). Thus the mercantilist obsession with the balance of payments.
Economists counter this mercantilist belief by pointing out that money is valuable only because it can be exchanged for real goods and services. Ultimately, wealth is not money and money is not wealth; ultimately wealth is the use of real goods and services. People who envy Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Dave the hedge-fund manager across town don’t really envy Jeff’s, Bill’s, or Dave’s possession of billions of Federal Reserve Notes (or of pieces of paper or streams of electronic bits that are easily convertible into dollars or some other currency). What the envious envy is Jeff’s, Bill’s, and Dave’s luxurious homes, luxury automobiles, private jets, top-rate medical care, and regular consumption of other real goods and services that are not affordable in the same quantities by less-wealthy people.
– Don Boudreaux
When there are no unemployed then the various capitalists are in competition with each other to find the labour they wish to exploit. That competition raising the price paid for the labour, that is, wages go up. Full employment really does mean wages rise. It’s worth noting that minimum wages have somewhere between little and nothing to do with this. The current Federal such is $7.25 an hour. Walmart already pays $10 an hour, from next month $11. Competition in markets is thus very much more powerful than legislation, no?
– Tim Worstall
In 1820, the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. Economic growth over the last 200 years completely transformed our world, with poverty falling continuously over the last two centuries. This is even more remarkable when we consider that the population increased 7-fold over the same time. In a world without economic growth, an increase in the population would result in less and less income for everyone. A 7-fold increase in the world population would be potentially enough to drive everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth, we managed to lift more and more people out of poverty.
[…]
Despite the clear evidence, many people are not aware of the fact that extreme poverty is declining across the world. The chart below shows the perceptions that survey-respondents in the UK have regarding global achievements in poverty reductions. While the share of extremely poor people has fallen faster than ever before in history over the last 30 years, the majority of people in the UK thinks that the opposite has happened, and that poverty has increased!
The chart below presents evidence from a survey in the UK, but ignorance of global development is even greater in other countries that were also surveyed. The extent of ignorance in the UK is particularly bad if we take into account that the shown result corresponds to a population with a university degree.
– Max Roser & Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
War and Peace is 1,200 pages long. Bleak House spreads to 1,000. Dodd-Frank, the US’s sprawling overhaul of financial regulations after 2008, runs to 848 pages – earning itself the nickname `Dodd-Frankenstein’. And the EU’s bumper trade deal with Canada reaches a hearty 1,600 pages. Last week, surmounting all of these achievements, the EU introduced a truly spectacular piece of regulation. `Mifid 2′ is its name and it weighs in at a princely 7,000 pages. That’s 1.4 million paragraphs, or six Bible-lengths. It must surely be a contender for the longest piece of red tape ever.
– Juliet Samuel (Daily Telegraph, registration required). Needless to say, people continue to drone on about “neo-liberalism” and “unfettered markets”. If only.
I can predict a standard retort: that if the UK wanted to be an enthusiastic EU member (no laughing at the back, kids) then it could influence the EU machine and reduce this regulation. But how has that worked out, really? True, I know of some politicians who have tried to slow this process down, but it continues regardless.
Sure, when the UK leaves, then UK-based firms that wish to do business with the EU will need to comply with EU regulations just as they must do so with the laws of the US, or Canada, Australia, or Planet Zog. But the process cuts two ways. If the UK parliament has any sense (big if, course) and keeps rules within bounds rather than “gold-plates” whatever is in force in other countries, then the UK will gain. Further, the very existence of countries with independent rule-making makes it harder for policymakers in transnational groupings such as the EU to create tax/regulatory cartels. (This is why countries such as Switzerland drive Brussels nuts.)
In time, the regulatory costs of doing business in the EU will cripple its financial markets, and that makes it rather harder to persuade yours truly that being outside this regulatory behemoth is so bad for business. Being outside a relatively free and flexible customs union, which is what the Single Market is, can sound risky, even daunting. Being outside an expensive, inflexible, bureaucratic nightmare is far less so. In fact, getting as far away as possible from such a structure is not just a smart gamble, but essential.
Public regulation is static by principle. According to his knowledge of the past, a regulator will define conditions for the presence. However, she cannot know what will come in the future. By definition, innovation represents the direct opposite. Innovator cares not about what people did in the past or what the current situation is. Innovation is a projection of the future. The issue arises when these two concepts collide in a concrete case. The regulators then judge the innovation on the basis of the old standards and the innovators judge the regulation based on their own vision of the future.
Today the static barriers of government regulations are exceeded by new technological innovations and new entrepreneurs. Therefore, it is necessary to take a step back and look at these issues from a broader perspective. We can also look at this problematics simplistically and see if the new technology fits into the official regulatory box, or not. And if it, by chance, doesn’t fit, we ban it automatically.
– Robert Chovanculiak
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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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