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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For the first time in recorded history, we have nearly every central bank printing money and trying to debase their currency. This has never happened before. How it’s going to work out, I don’t know. It just depends on which one goes down the most and first, and they take turns. When one says a currency is going down, the question is against what? Because they are all trying to debase themselves. It’s a peculiar time in world history.
– Jim Rogers, the investor, adventurer and commentator, as quoted at the splendid Zero Hedge website.
(I like the site’s motto: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”)
On a related theme of currency debasement and government tactics, this book, Currency Wars, looks a gruesomely entertaining read.
“The Gini coefficient in my office is close to 1.0. How I yearn for the assembly line.” — An anonymous finance professional of arid wit.
I often see postings by friends on social media sites trumpeting the fact that the “gap between rich and poor” (whatever that might mean) is terrible in the United States and we must do something about it.
When confronted with such statements, I usually note that the Gini coefficient (which seems to be what they are referring to) is far lower in India, and yet most poor people in the United States would strongly resist trading places with someone in India at the same decile of income, while strangely most poor people in India probably would trade places with their counterpart in the United States.
The reply I generally get in return is either silence, or sometimes a pointer to some sort of document or video purporting to explain how damaging to society a big “gap between rich and poor” is. (Such materials are generally rather unconvincing, at least to me.)
I continue to hold that it is better to be eating well but to know that others are doing even better than you than it is to know that even though you are starving most other people are too. The former will keep you fed, while the latter should reasonably appeal only to those so encumbered by jealousy that they prefer universal misery to the success of others.
I suppose, however, that it is a question of personal values. To me, envy is not a rational basis for public policy, but others appear to feel it is the only one that counts.
Living cultures change. It is the very process of change that makes them themselves. Their sameness is not merely a matter of their difference from other cultures, but of their differences from themselves over time, just as a person who grows from childhood to adulthood remains the same person only by changing. What too many observers from wealthy societies seem to identify as the essential cultural element of poorer societies is their poverty. I have observed the disappointment of visitors from wealthy cultures when colorful poor people dressed in brilliant clothes stop, pat themselves down, and take out cell phones in response to insistent ringing sounds. It’s not authentic! It ruins the whole trip! Those people are being robbed of their culture! They’re victims of global capitalism! The arrogance of those who want to keep the poor in their native environments, lizards in a terrarium, is startling.
Although seeing a Dalit (“untouchable”) or a Mayan highlander talking on a cell phone may ruin the visit of a wealthy poverty tourist, being able to use telephony to talk to their friends, family members, or business associates is often highly valued by the people who bought the cell phones and should not be seen as a threat to their identity. Globalization is making possible a culture of wealth and freedom for Dalits and Mayans, who can enjoy wealth and freedom without ceasing to be the people they are. Just as culture should not be identified with isolation or stasis, it should not be identified with poverty.
Tom G Palmer, Realizing Freedom, page 371.
The essay from which these paragraphs are taken reminded me of the recent talk that Samizdata commenter Michael Jennings gave at the apartment of Brian Micklethwait. Meanwhile, some time ago I wrote about an excellent book by the economist, Tyler Cowen, who also challenges the clichéd views about globalisation and the presumed “flattening” and homogenising effect it is supposed to have on cultures. In fact, as Cowen and Palmer notes, what globalisation and the spread of things such as IT does is often enable more, not less, diversity in certain respects.
I should add that Palmer’s book is excellent reading, blending a mix of theory (he subjects the likes of John Rawls and GA Cohen to a brutal dissection) and essays on specific issues such as repression in Egypt, the problems in Iraq, and the curious contortions of “left libertarians”. Tom is a great person who travels far and wide in the job of spreading classical liberalism and free market ideas. I don’t know how he handles the jet-lag.
Several months ago I instructed the internet to tell me about anything concerning 3D printing, but I usually now file the resulting emails under: to be looked at later if at all. People saying they have worked out how to make ever more intricate and ever more tasteless and 70s-ish napkin rings no longer excite me that much. Okay, I get it. The technique works. But come on. A napkin ring? That takes four hours to get made? (That’s how long the damn video goes on for! Although I now learn from another video at the same site that the process may have got stuck after an hour. So, how long does it actually take to 3D print this napkin ring? Don’t tell me. I really do not care.)
I earlier here pondered, and quickly discarded, the idea that 3D printing would be arriving in our homes some time quite soon. What 3D printing really is is better stuff-making, by the people who already make stuff.
So it was that this link – which does not concern brightly coloured napkin rings, but on the contrary is to a story (here is the original Wired version) about an enterprise that has used 3D printing to make the body of a car – really did get my attention. This car body is just as strong as a regular steel car body but much lighter, and hence much more fuel efficient. Oh sure, it’ll still be years before most cars are made this way, but this surely is the future starting to reveal itself, to those of us beyond the circle of specialists who are already paying close attention to such developments. As was noted in one of the comments on my earlier 3D printing here (that’s the link again), car makers (Mercedes was singled out for our attention) already use 3D printing, to make small but important car parts. So it won’t be a huge leap for them to use 3D printing to make rather bigger car parts, until hey presto, they’re 3D printing entire cars!
The comments on that earlier posting were very informative. But nobody, except me in the original posting, discussed the possibility that 3D printing could shift the balance of manufacturing power somewhat back from the getting-rich world to the already-rich world. This is an idea you now hear quite a lot. Thinking about that idea some more, I think that 3D printing may be less of a macro-economic game changer that at first it looked, to me, like being. The idea, in other words, resembles the idea of a 3D printer in every home. After all, here is yet another manufacturing method, devised and developed in the richest and cleverest places, but then, surely, easily unleashable in any place, and in particular in places that are merely getting richer and getting cleverer. Does that change the game? It sounds like the game as usual to me. Which could be why nobody else thought the idea worth commenting on. But maybe I am getting that wrong.
Michael Jennings’ talk about globalisation at my home last Friday was both fascinating and entertaining.
It’s tempting for a blogger to assume that because he has said all his stuff several times over, in about a hundred blog postings, that everyone who cares about it now gets it. But a talk that pulls a lot of it together actually tells even his most regular readers a great deal that they probably didn’t previously get. So it was last Friday.
The basic point was that “globalisation”, far from being a great big steam-roller that flattens every individual local culture into ubiquitous uniformity, is actually a complex process, in which the supposed steam-roller is confronted by local forces that are often at least as powerful as the steam-roller and which oblige the steam-roller to behave very differently in each different spot. The result is not a simpler and duller world, but a far more complex and interesting and abundant one. In any given place, globalisation means that there will be far more to choose from, and each place, by shaping how globalisation happens locally, retains its individuality. It even becomes more individual and unusual, because of the extra layer of complexity and interestingness brought to it by foreign influences, locally modified.
The particular example of globalised uniformity that people who have only visited a tiny few of the most famous Western cities regularly cite is fast food chains. But taste in food, whatever the food’s velocity, varies a lot from place to place, and if Mcdonald’s ever had a plan to impose total dietary uniformity upon the world, any such plan has long been abandoned. The simple McDonald’s hamburger mutates into any number of local variations for any number of local reasons, not the least of which is that in quite a few places ham is forbidden, never mind not liked. What and how people eat varied hugely from country to country in the past, and it still does.
Michael’s style was of the anecdotal, feel-free-to-interrupt sort, so different listeners will remember different little illustrative stories among the many he told. My two favourites both concerned exceptions to the general point that Michael was making, exceptions which, with their oddity and rarity, prove the rule, as the rather odd saying goes. Because, both concerned global forces so overwhelming and irresistible in the force that they bring to bear on particular places that the quirks of that particular place really are powerless to resist.
→ Continue reading: Michael Jennings on how actual globalisation really works (and two exceptions to the rule)
The belief that a sound monetary system can once again be attained without making substantial changes in economic policy is a serious error. What is needed first and foremost is to renounce all inflationist fallacies. This renunciation cannot last, however, if it is not firmly grounded on a full and complete divorce of ideology from all imperialist, militarist, protectionist, statist, and socialist ideas.
– Ludwig von Mises in Stabilization of the Monetary Unit— From the Viewpoint of Theory, Introduction, VIII: The Ideological Meaning of Reform, final paragraph. Quoted by Thorsten Polleit, at the end of his article Fiat Money and Collective Corruption.
I am about to attend a Mises Circle discussion of Polleit’s article this evening, at the IEA.
From today’s Financial Times:
BNP Paribas made a loud contribution to the debate on how comfortable fund managers, and financial institutions generally, should be about speculating on food prices last week.
On the back of criticism from Oxfam, the international aid agency, which accused the French house of “speculating on hunger”, BNP suspended subscriptions on two of its funds.
BNP’s Parvest World Agriculture fund, which manages €159m of assets, has been shut to new investors as a “precautionary” measure, while its EasyETF Ultra Light Energy fund has also been closed.
BNP Paribas has funds in which its clients invest; those funds hold investments in agricultural-related businesses and properties of one kind or another, such as companies that make farm machinery, etc. If commodity prices for things such as wheat and soy are rising and that encourages the share prices of various industries to rise, and this encourages more investment in those industries so that the production of said commodities rises, this is not a bug of capitalism, but a feature. And if those speculators, who bet that prices will rise, and they do, and therefore make money, their price-creation role – conveying information that triggers responses – is to be applauded, not condemned.
Oxfam, and other organisations that throw rocks at the financial intermediary role of speculators and the like, is merely playing to a long-established trope. It is demonstrating economic illiteracy on an epic scale. I can, of course, understand why a large bank that makes a big point of its image not wishing to offend organisations such as Oxfam. But bear in mind that what Oxfam objects to is the very process of the free market in action. When a bank caves into such pressure, then that surely is a sign that anyone serious about making money from the agricultural sector would be better advised to do so elsewhere.
In the meantime, if anyone can explain to me how a hungry person in a country benefits from such actions, do let me know.
Update: I suppose it is possible to argue that central bank inflation of the money supply via quantitative easing is encouraging investors to put this money into commodities and other “hard assets” in ways that have unforseen and negative effects, but I haven’t seen that point made by Oxfam.
Following the highly successful (nobody has said otherwise to me) relaunch of Brian’s Fridays with a talk by Sam Bowman on January 25th, the last Friday of February is now approaching fast, in fact it is about as early in the month as a last Friday is capable of being, namely February 22nd. Tomorrow week, in other words. And my speaker will be my good friend and fellow Samizdatista, Michael Jennings, talking about How globalisation has made the world less rather than more homogenised. (And yes, isn’t it great that we now have author archives here?)
It will not amaze Samizdata readers to learn that Michael’s talk will be making maximum use of his impressive understanding of business and of technology, together with the fact that for as long as any of his London friends have known him he has been roaming the globe, looking at the impact of such things at first hand. Follow the above link if you doubt this, and look in particular at postings like this one, from last Christmas Eve. Many speak these days about globalisation. Michael really does know a great deal about what this process now consists of.
As I have earlier said here, one of my purposes in relaunching these evenings is to stir up more blogging than might otherwise have happened, by me and by others, both before and in response to these events. And that is now starting to happen. So far such blogging has mostly been me, but now Michael has joined in, with a couple of postings at my personal blog which are his in all but name, here and here, mentioning some of the themes he is now busy wrestling down into a forty minute talk.
The second of these two postings includes four photos, taken in Georgia, Cyprus, Tianjin (which is the fourth largest city in China), and Mumbai. He will be showing us further photos on the night. It also contains this line (under the Tianjin picture):
One could write an entire book about fake Apple Stores.
I wanted to make that today’s SQOTD, but the spot had already been taken.
What such bloggage means is that these meetings will have an impact way beyond the mere people who happen to show up on the night, in a way that was very hard to contrive with meetings of this sort in the days before the internet. As so often, when it comes to newly devised ways of communicating, the new ways don’t render the old ways obsolete. On the contrary, they make the old ways both easier to organise and more significant in their impact. Even if you don’t ever come within a thousand miles of my home, you may still benefit, albeit indirectly, from these meetings taking place.
As to the obvious way of multiplying the impact of these talks, by video-ing them, at present I am not doing this. Opinion, what I know of it, is divided on the wisdom of this decision, but my feeling is (a) that video works better when it is shorter and more visually punchy than just a person talking for half an hour or more, and (b) that there is value in at least some speaker meetings not being videoed. (If no other libertarians were videoing meetings, I probably would.) Speakers, especially the sort of younger and less experienced speakers whom I intend quite often to invite, may feel freer, in such unimortalised circumstances, to explore subjects outside their comfort zones and off the beaten tracks of the usual libertarian topics and arguments. Unvideoed meetings are a chance for people to think aloud, and perhaps attempt a talk which they will later perfect and want to have videoed, when it is good and ready.
If you would like to attend Michael’s globralisation talk, or would like information about future Brian’s Fridays, please email me (by clicking where it says “Contact”, top left, there), or leave a comment here (or there).
I am not much impressed with Roger Bootle’s drearily conventional arguments for what the UK economy needs.
“I have banged on before about decisions on key projects which have large public sector involvement but which may also hold the key to major private sector spending, e.g. over London’s airport capacity.”
Preposterous Keynesian fallacy at work. It presupposes that money allocated to some project via the political process is more likely to create a ‘multiplier’ than market driven uses of that money… and it assumes that the money taken by the state by force would not have been invested in something more worthwhile in aggregate if the decisions were left to its original owners before it was confiscated by the state.
But of course as it is easier to see something like an airport rather than the myriad of other uses the money would have gone to had it not been forced into that project, so somehow the big flashy ‘infrastructure’ protect is claimed to have driven knock-on investment and is therefore an obvious Good Thing. As Bastiat put it “That which is seen versus that which is not seen”.
Ain’t necessarily so and given the record of government decision making versus the more diffused decision making of markets, usually ain’t so.
A few months ago I gave a talk to Libertarian Home, of the sort that happen regularly at the Rose and Crown in Southwark. (They have a speakerless social at the same venue which I intend to be at, tomorrow.) My talk was … well, to put it kindly, it was somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It had its moments, but it didn’t add up. Worse, the more I struggled to pull it together, the longer it went on and the more incoherent it got.
But something good may yet have emerged from this muddle, because Libertarian Home’s Simon Gibbs and I recently agreed that it might make sense to rescue (i.e. for Simon Gibbs to rescue) one of the somewhat better bits of this talk and make it into a video short. Simon has now done this, with added graphics.
The subject is something I have already blogged about here, namely the tendency of statist measures to start out quite good, only later going wrong and then ever more wrong, and on the other hand the tendency of a truly free market, when a particular bit of it starts, to be a mess, and only somewhat later to start getting seriously good and in the long run superb. Two intersecting graphs, in other words, one going up and then down and down, and the other going down and then up and up.
My first label for this phenomenon involved hockey sticks, but when it comes to graphs the hockey stick is well and truly taken, and now I’m calling my graphs “alpha” graphs, because that’s how they look when put together.
Alas, even this bit of my talk could have been a whole lot more eloquent. For starters, I should have waved my arms around in a way that fitted how the graphs would look to the audience. As it was, I got them the wrong way around, sideways I mean, and hence somewhat clashing with what Simon does with them in his superimposed graphics. Nevertheless, the basic idea survives, I think, and is usefully provocative of further thought, as Simon demonstrates with his own further thoughts.
My own main further thought about the Alpha Graphs (here’s hoping those capitals catch on) is that the Adam Smith Institute should be mentioned in connection with them. One of the ASI’s basic tactical insights from way back is that there are indeed often many advantages to be gained and gamed by politically well-connected individuals or organisations or companies, from statist policies rather than free market policies, but that with a bit of cunning these tendencies can be countered, for instance by making the arrival of a competitive market very much to the advantage of a few big early participants, or with right-to-buy, right-to-sell arrangements with regard to such things as public housing that goes back into the market. It’s a matter of how you sell the new market, and to whom. Instead of just using Public Choice Theory (the Alpha Graphs being a tiny part of all that) to excuse libertarian policy failure; use it to point you in better (because more politically effective) policy directions.
That isn’t the complete answer to the problems described by the Alpha Graphs, but it is certainly a part of it.
The other thing I want to repeat in this posting is that I think that short videos are an excellent way to go, when it comes to spreading libertarian ideas, provided only that you know how to produce them adequately. (The technique has recently been used with great effectiveness by the Adam Smith Institute’s own Madsen Pirie to explicate basic economics.) I hope Simon Gibbs produces many more such video quickies in the next few years, and helps and encourages others to do the same, both in the form of excerpts from other bigger performances (by no means only from performances that he himself has recorded), and in the form of original creations of his own. Such a program could be a great developer of future libertarian star performers, as well as a chance for older libertarians like me to add their pennyworths.
Many developed nations are currently in the midst of the worst recession they have experienced in decades. I would like to call for an economic stimulus to aid in their recovery.
I am referring not to the useless Keynesian orgy of wealth destruction that is often meant by this word, but an obvious strategy for improving economic growth that (mysteriously) most politicians rarely consider.
My proposed means of stimulus is the mass firing of government employees.
Every government employee fired aids the economy in three distinct ways.
First, there is the direct cost of the salary, benefits and retirement of those employees, which must be sucked out of the rest of the economy through coercive taxation, weakening it. Each dollar we leave in the hands of ordinary people is a dollar they can then proceed to spend on things they really want, which is always better for the economy than a coerced expenditure. (To be technical, the Pareto optimality of free exchanges and non-optimality of coerced ones lead us to the conclusion that a dollar spent freely is always of more value than a dollar extracted by force.)
Second, there is the cost to the economy of the negative work most government employees do. Although a small fraction of government employees are engaged in jobs that would exist even in a free society, such as designing bridges and the like, most employees in a modern government spend their time interfering in the productivity of others, reducing their output. Every time we dismiss someone whose job is to produce new rules governing the licensing of hair stylists or who spends their time investigating the conduct of pedicab drivers, we increase the productivity of those who will no longer be harmed by the efforts of those government employees. (Indeed, some individual government employees doubtless reduce the productivity of hundreds or thousands of private workers.)
Third, there is the cost to the economy of having someone essentially idle. Most government employees do nothing of actual use, and there is an opportunity cost to that. Such people could instead be doing something of value with their labor — from making chairs to writing computer software to running private enterprises. Every additional chair that gets produced (provided there is market demand for it) increases the wealth of the world. Instead of being a net drain on society, each government employee, once dismissed from their job and allowed to find useful work instead, could be a net gain to society. (Even those government employees engaged in work that might exist even in a free society, such as delivering packages or teaching children, could do so more efficiently if employed in organizations that were disciplined by market mechanisms.)
I would go so far as to say that this triple effect of every government employee dismissal implies a multiplier effect. (The uninformed might naively consider only the direct cost savings and not the other added benefits.)
I will also argue that the more we fire, the greater the stimulus, without any obvious limit short of running out of people to dismiss. There isn’t even any need to wait for a recession to enjoy the salutary effects of such a stimulus — a nation experiencing high growth can still increase it by this mechanism. Unlike other forms of stimulus, it is also possible for even the most impoverished of nations to undertake such a program without the least fiscal risk.
I therefore implore elected officials to adopt such programs as soon as practical. Every day of delay costs.
Arranging a meeting and chairing the Q&A of it is hard to combine with actually listening to all that gets said. So when it comes to what I personally learned from Sam Bowman’s excellent talk at my home (already plugged here) last Friday, and from the various reactions to it from the rest of us, it’s a case of me picking out verbal cherries, rather than me now being able to describe the entire fruit bowl. Mostly what I want to say is what an excellent restart Sam Bowman gave to Brian’s Fridays 2.0.
Bowman’s starting point was the difference between, in Donald Rumsfeld’s famed phraseology, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”, on the one hand the things you know you don’t know and quite consciously and deliberately choose to remain ignorant of, and on the other hand the things you don’t even know are out there to be known about.
I know that I don’t know how to sort my computer out when it malfunctions worse than trivially, but I have many friends more computer-savvy than I am. So for me, computer expertise is a known unknown. I am neglecting it, but do so “rationally”. I am approximately aware of what I am neglecting, and of the approximate costs attached to such neglect.
But what of unknown unknowns? As Sam Bowman so wisely said, those are harder to describe! If you could think of an example of an unknown unknown, then it wouldn’t be unknown, would it? The point being that unknown unknowns only reveal themselves in the form of surprises, “surprise” being a word that Bowman returned to quite a few times.
The case for a free society is not that we know exactly how it will be wonderful, but rather that it allows an infinity of different bets to be placed on where it is and where it’s headed and where it should be headed. Some of these bets will be right, a few very much so, although as much by luck as by judgement. In a centrally governed society, where one particular viewpoint is given the force of law, that one dominant judgement is almost certain to be wrong.
You can talk about “unknown unknowns” in retrospect, though, once they have finally made themselves known. Sam concentrated in particular on the now widely known, but a few years back not at all widely known, privileged legal position of those three now famous “ratings agencies”, S&P and … er … the other two. (He did of course say, but I wasn’t taking notes.) Also not at all widely understood were the Basel Accords (Sam rather charmingly called them what to my ear sounded more like the “Basil” Accords), which, in effect, positively demanded that banks to buy lots of “investments” of the sort then assumed prudent but subsequently revealed to be the opposite. The financial crash happened as a result of central bankers all scrupulously, in the name of “prudence” (remember her?), doing exactly as they were told to do and as they assumed they ought to do. This was a crash caused not by the neglect of duty, but by the misunderstanding of what duty really demanded. The bankers were not evil and greedy. They were misinformed. As is further illustrated by their own personal investment decisions, which were much the same as the investment decisions they made on behalf of others.
Others present may want to correct and fill out the above description of what Bowman said, Bowman himself in particular. I do not now plan to record my evenings for posterity, and this one wasn’t. I’d welcome comments about the wisdom of that decision. On the one hand, recoding would be a nice service for those who can’t attend. On the other, I want speakers to feel that here is a chance to explore, in a friendly setting, ideas they may not yet be completely on top of. I particularly like asking people to talk about things that they hadn’t perhaps realised were worth talking about, or people who have not themselves done much public speaking and maybe didn’t know they had it in them (in among other more practised and confident speakers). Recording equipment might get in the way of all that. There is, after all, nothing to stop someone else recording them talking about what they said at my place.
The reaction to Bowman’s talk can be summarised as: well, maybe, maybe not. The feeling of the room was that some people had given at least some thought to the possibility of looming financial disaster. Advice had been given to the higher-ups that was based on all kinds of assumptions holding true: provided this or that, then all will be well. The higher-ups tended to hear only the “all will be well” bit, while neglecting the earlier stuff about the assumptions being made. But the people who had given the advice certainly remembered the earlier bits. But what could they do, once those assumptions started to look seriously dodgy? The advisers were not themselves higher-ups.
For me the phrase of the night was “Too big to think about”, see my title above. Like many a memorable phrase, this one is adapted from another common phrase that has been doing the rounds: “Too big to fail”. Too big to fail refers to the dilemma of top decision makers when the proverbial waste matter had already hit the fan. “Too big to think about” refers to the problem of the uneasy lower-downers, the advisers, the quants and the specialists, the ones who did have very bad feelings, beforehand. Too big to think about referred to those for whom the unknown unknowns that eventually clobbered the higher-ups were actually, somewhat, known about beforehand. Various people in the room last Friday “actually heard people say” that if such-and-such does turn out as feared, then we’re all so f***ed there’s nothing that we, and certainly not that I, can do about it. We (I) will have far bigger problems than are covered by my little remit. So, we (I) just have to hope that all will be well, because if it isn’t, that’s … too big to think about!
Which leads inevitably on to the question of how much it was merely pure ignorance that was in play here, and to what extent moral turpitude was involved. How “pure”, that is to say, was the ignorance? There is, after all, a particular sort of immorality that consists of refusing to face unwelcome truths and to think about them in any detail. (Someone mentioned “unopened envelopes” at this point in the discussion.) The consensus of the evening, at any rate from where I stood (which tells you something of how crowded the room was), was that Bowman was making an illuminating extreme point, so to speak, but that the truth was somewhat more muddy and more morally complicated.
What was it about these financial institutions that made them vulnerable to such fingers-crossed, hope-for-the-best, ignore-the-worst, group-think? Mention was made of how a much more widely known-about-in-advance and much criticised set of rules, involving government guarantees of bank deposits, caused banks to be all about crazy risks and not at all about their own prudence, truly understood. That made particular sense to me.
I expected Sam’s talk to be good, and it was. But the quality of the Q&A struck me as being of a particularly high quality last Friday, with quite a few of those present having personal experience of the financial discussions and dilemmas being alluded to. Which is a further reason to maybe not freeze the speakers thoughts electronically. What if, in the light of what he hears from the floor, he ends up thinking slightly differently about his subject than he did when actually speaking?
What I particularly liked about the evening, aside from the quality of the speaker and the quality of the audience that the speaker attracted, was that, instead of assuming total stupidity or total villainy on the part of people from whom we hope and continue to hope for different and better thoughts and decisions, we were all, thanks to Sam Bowman’s eloquent lead, making a serious attempt to get inside the heads of these various decision-makers and their advisers. Arguing works far better if you seriously try to understand where other people are coming from and how they see the world, rather than just making insulting assumptions about their motives and thought processes. Us libertarians (in particular me libertarian) getting better at arguing is (for me) what these evenings are all about.
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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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