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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Paul Krugman:
“Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending in Europe as a whole.”
Let us fisk this:
“The story so far: In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, Europe, like America, had a runaway banking system and a rapid buildup of debt. In Europe’s case, however, much of the lending was across borders, as funds from Germany flowed into southern Europe. This lending was perceived as low risk. Hey, the recipients were all on the euro, so what could go wrong?”
Nice piece of snark, which I do not demur from.
“For the most part, by the way, this lending went to the private sector, not to governments. Only Greece ran large budget deficits during the good years; Spain actually had a surplus on the eve of the crisis.”
That may be true. I have not checked. However, the fact that Spain’s public finances went down the toilet so fast does not quite suggest that the Spanish public sector was a model of mean-minded prudence.
“Then the bubble burst. Private spending in the debtor nations fell sharply. And the question European leaders should have been asking was how to keep those spending cuts from causing a Europe-wide downturn.”
No, they should have been facing up to the fact that a vast number of mal-investments were caused by a decade of under-priced credit, and that there was no way that such a build-up of bad investments can be unwound painlessly. Seeking to hold off the pain by increasing public spending (and hence scaring the hell out of the global bond market) is hardly likely to achieve the desired effect.
“During the years of easy money, wages and prices in southern Europe rose substantially faster than in northern Europe. This divergence now needs to be reversed, either through falling prices in the south or through rising prices in the north. And it matters which: If southern Europe is forced to deflate its way to competitiveness, it will both pay a heavy price in employment and worsen its debt problems. The chances of success would be much greater if the gap were closed via rising prices in the north.”
That may be true in crudely political terms; after having enjoyed the fat years, those who have done so are not likely to enjoy a lean period. However…
“But to close the gap through rising prices in the north, policy makers would have to accept temporarily higher inflation for the euro area as a whole. And they’ve made it clear that they won’t. Last April, in fact, the European Central Bank began raising interest rates, even though it was obvious to most observers that underlying inflation was, if anything, too low.”
Well, it seems a bit glib to assume, as Keynesians like Professor Krugman do, that the inflation will prove to be temporary… Riiiight… One key problem for the eurozone, as he ought to know, is that labour markets in much of the region are so heavily regulated that getting a meaningful adjustment in wages and prices is hard, and yet this has to happen if countries such as Greece and Germany are to co-exist under the same currency area without strife. The same issue, of course, would apply if the whole region were to adopt, say, an inelastic system of real money instead of fiat money issued by a central bank or banks.
Another point for Professor Krugman to remember is that in some member nations, such as France, there has been double-digit percent unemployment for the young long before anyone had heard about sub-prime or credit crunches. And Europe’s record for wealth and job creation, compared to that of the US prior to the crunch, has been and remains lamentable.
James Taranto quotes Thomas Edsall, saying (among other things) this, about the kinds of votes that Democrats are now trying to get, and other votes that they are no longer bothering to try to get:
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment – professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists –
Edsall goes on to say that the whereas the Dems have now given up on the white workers, they are still eager to get all the non-white workers to vote for them.
One of the ways to understand the libertarian movement, it seems to me, is that it is an attempt to convert from their present foolishness all those “professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists” whom Edsall so takes for granted. It gives them the “social libertarianism” that they are so wedded to (even if they often don’t get what this actually means), but it insists on the necessity of at least some – and in the current circumstances of economic crisis – a lot more – libertarianism in economic matters. Okay, libertarianism will never conquer these groups completely, but it threatens to at least divide them, into quite a few libertarians or libertarian-inclined folks and not quite so many idiots.
Also, demography is not destiny, when it comes to voting. People’s “interests” are not necessarily what many party political strategists assume them to be.
The thing is, it is entirely rational to vote for more government jobs and more government hand-outs (a) if you are at the front of the queue for such things, and (b) if the supply of such things is potentially abundant, or not, depending on how you and everyone else votes. But, if the world changes, and you find yourself at the top of the list to have your job or your hand-outs taken away from you, in a world which is going to take these things away from a lot of people no matter how anybody votes, it makes sense to ask yourself different questions, and to consider voting for entirely different things. Like: lots of government cuts, so that you aren’t the only one who suffers them, and so that the economy has a chance of getting back into shape in the future, soon enough for you to enjoy it.
The far side of the Laffer Curve is a rather strange place. Different rules apply.
Quite a lot of unemployed British people voted for Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, because they reckoned that Thatcher was a better bet to create the kind of country that might give them – and their children and their grandchildren – jobs in the future and a better life generally. (Whether or not they were right to vote for Thatcher is a different argument. My point is, this is what they did, and they were not being irrational.)
There is also the fact that how you vote in such circumstances of national and global crisis will be influenced, far more than in kinder and gentler times, by how you think. For a start, how bad do you think that the national or global crisis actually is? If you think it’s bad, what policies do you think will get that economy back motoring again, in a way which has a decent chance of lasting? How you vote depends on how you think the world works. And how you think can change.
The concept of property is fundamental to our society, probably to any workable society. Operationally, it is understood by every child above the age of three. Intellectually, it is understood by almost no one.
Consider the slogan “property rights vs. human rights.” Its rhetorical force comes from the implication that property rights are the rights of property and human rights the rights of humans; humans are more important than property (chairs, tables, and the like); consequently, human rights take precedence over property rights.
But property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans with regard to property.
– from The Machinery of Freedom (1973) by David Friedman, Part 1, “In defense of property”.
This is an attempt to get an Instalanche, so he will probably ignore it just to make the point that he doesn’t do Instalanches for anything that flat out asks for it. Although, on the other hand …
Either way, two recent objects of linkage at Instapundit in recent times have been Climategate and Goldman Sachs. Well, this Climategate email, spotted by Bishop Hill commenter “GS” (3:27pm), concerns Goldman Sachs, so the Prof ought at least to be interested:
Goldman Sachs #4092
date: Mon, 18 May 1998 10:00:38 +0100
from: Trevor Davies
subject: goldman-sachs
to: REDACTED,REDACTED,REDACTED
Jean,
We (Mike H) have done a modest amount of work on degree-days for G-S. They now want to extend this. They are involved in dealing in the developing
energy futures market.
G-S is the sort of company that we might be looking for a ‘strategic alliance’ with. I suggest the four of us meet with ?? (forgotten his name) for an hour on the afternoon of Friday 12 June (best guess for Phil & Jean – he needs a date from us). Thanks.
Trevor
Instapundit has also long been interested by the BBC, as a phenomenon of more than local interest. So I would also recommend to him, and to people generally, a read through of the Bishop Hill comment two down from that one above, this time from “ThinkingScientist” (3:41pm). He copies and pastes an email from a BBC Producer to Keith Briffa, about how Briffa must “prove” (the BBC Producer’s inverted commas) in a BBC TV show that there is something very extreme about the supposed current warming spurt. In other words, Briffa must put the C (for catastrophic) in CAGW.
GW for global warming has clearly been happening, although it is not nearly so clear that it is still happening now. (Anyone who denies the second is routinely accused of denying the first.) A for anthropogenic GW is widely believed in, but its scale and even existence are matters of fierce controversy. It’s that C for catastrophic on the front of AGW that this is all about. For a power grab this big, there has to be a C in there.
LATER: And, we have our Instalanche. Many thanks sir. (And thanks to the commenter who corrected my earlier wrong spelling of Instalanche.)
Last Tuesday Detlev Schlichter gave another talk, one of several that he is doing around now in various parts of the world, on Paper Money Collapse. Last Tuesday’s talk was organised by the Adam Smith Institute. I attended this talk and can vouch for the fact that the audience was such that it was standing room only by the time it started, partly thanks (or so I was told the following day) to this City AM report of an interview that they recently did with Schlichter.
This talk is now available for viewing on video, a fact which I learned at Libertarian Home, thanks to a posting there by Andy Janes, who describes it as having been “very impressive, if terrifying”. Indeed. You can watch it there. It lasts just under fifty minutes.
The Daily Telegraph has an article defending the idea that general practitioners can and sometimes do out-earn the banking business. Of course, people have not traditionally gone into the medical field looking to make millions, although some innovators of medical patents, for instance, may have done just that. Generally speaking, I take the view that so long as doctors are operating in a free market, then what they receive is a matter of indifference to me. Good luck to those who do well, I say. If we had a genuine market in healthcare, then the high salaries paid to the best doctors would, in time, attract bright people to become doctors rather than say, derivatives traders, or whatever.
Of course, this is not the present situation. With many doctors, their pay is partly driven by their membership of a restricted profession and in the case of the UK, by the money spent by the taxpayer. And as for bankers, or at least some of them, they too benefit from the privileged access to central banking funding of their employers, from bailouts, from barriers to entry erected by regulators, and so on. So if people in Wall Street and the City do get sniffy about how much the men and women in white coats sometimes get paid, remember, they are not quite operating in a free market world, either.
Yes, I know that there might be some room for doubt here, but an example I came across in the news pages of CityAM today clearly highlights how so-called environmental taxes are hurting the economy and costing jobs, often in areas already in dire straits:
RIO TINTO yesterday said new environmental taxes and red tape were partly to blame for the closure of its Lynemouth aluminium smelter in Northumberland, risking 600 jobs.
The mining giant said the smelter “is no longer a sustainable business because its energy costs are increasing significantly, due largely to emerging legislation.
It is thought that the coalition’s controversial plans for a carbon price floor, announced in the 2011 Budget, are being blamed alongside EU emissions trading and large combustible plant rules.
Earlier this month, the lobby group Energy Intensive Users Group said Rio Tinto was among dozens of firms asking the government for some relief from the carbon price rules.
An agreement has not been made in time for Lynemouth to remain open, though a government “support package” is due before the end of the year.
The government recognises the need to support energy-intensive industry,” said a Treasury spokesperson yesterday.
Personally, I think risking 600 jobs is pathetic. If the AGW alarmists are really that good, they should be looking to risk millions. They need to raise their game.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but you can see why this blog, along with others, gets angry about the lying and bad faith of those “scientists” who exaggerate their doomongering, and the politicians who embrace their ideas. It has consequences for actual lives.
This evening I dined with a friend, and on my way there took this snap of an Evening Standard headline. A couple of years ago I thought that the Evening Standard itself – never mind these billboards – would soon be extinct. But although diminished in number, these headlines are still a familiar part of the London scene, now as then usually telling of catastrophe of one kind or another, public or personal. This evening’s offering was no exception:
Here‘s the story. Depending on your preferred explanation for this sad circumstance, you’ll pick out a different bit of the story. I pick this:
The shocking new total was published today as Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King warned Britain is in danger of sliding back into recession.
He downgraded his growth forecasts again, saying the economy will expand by one per cent this year and next, a fraction of the hoped-for rate.
As Instpundit would say: Unexpectedly! It would appear that quantitative easing is proving less than completely stimulating. We here are not shocked by this bad unemployment news.
For a little light relief, here’s a snap I took later, on my way home:
The advertising trade was bound to take advantage sooner or later of the wave of health and safety signage that is such a feature of British life just now. This is the first time I’ve noticed it, but I’m sure others have seen such things many times already.
In London right now, it is an hour or more past 9 am. But in Cape Town, South Africa, just over an hour ago, it was 11:11 am, on the 11/11/11 (November 11th 2011), and South Africa needed 111 runs to win the international cricket match that they were playing against Australia. South Africa, sadly, were not 111-1, chasing 222. They were 126-1, chasing 236. So, time and date oddities aside, a cricket match is drawing to a calm, even predictable end. Right? Well, yes. But yesterday, 10/11/11 or 11/10/11 or whatever you call yesterday, it was very different.
Those baffled and/or repulsed by cricket and its arithmetically obsessed followers like me should probably skip the next few paragraphs. Summary: this has been one weird test match. But now, skip down to where it says: “Okay, here is my serious Samizdata-type point.”
Okay cricket nutters, on we go with the story. Here is the sort of thing that was happening in Cape Town yesterday:
W W . 4 . . | W . . . . . | . . W . . . | . . . 4 . W | 1 1 . W
At the end of the first day of this test match, Australia had reached a rather meagre 214-8, but on the morning of the second day, yesterday, they did better, getting to 284 all out, thanks to more excellent batting by their new captain, Michael Clarke, who was last out for 151. South Africa then progressed to 49-1 at lunch. So far so normal.
About an hour later South Africa were all out for 96 having only just avoided the follow-on, the above WW stuff being a slice of that action. Australia then went into bat, and at the tea interval were themselves struggling on 13-3. Then, in no time at all after tea, they had slumped to a truly catastrophic 21-9. They then recovered, if that’s the right word, to the dizzy heights of 47 all out. Another action slice:
W . . 3 . . | . . . W . . | . W . W
The South African Vernon Philander, playing in his first test, took five wickets for fifteen runs, bringing his total for the match to eight. Quite a start. Earlier Shane Watson had taken five for seventeen for Australia.
A Cricinfo commenter suggested that Australia should declare at tea time, setting South Africa two hundred to win in very adverse conditions. He didn’t say, an hour later, that Australia should have declared at tea time. He said it at tea time, when Australia were 13-3. And they probably should have! Australia having batted successfully in the morning, South Africa began their second innings and ended this bizarre day with similar batting success, reaching 81-1 by the close. Today, they began needing only a further 155 to win. If South Africa do win, they’ll be thanking their last wicket pair, Dale Steyn and Imran Tahir, who added thirteen and saved that follow-on. Take away that stand, and South Africa might have lost by an innings by now. As it now stands, and given that they have made a fine start this morning, South Africa now look sure to win.
If, despite being a cricketphobe, you read all that and would like to know approximately what it means, think of it as the cricketing equivalent of a world cup soccer quarter-final match between, say, Italy and Germany, where the scorecard after half and hour was 0-0, but by half time it was Italy 6 Germany 0, and then about fifteen minutes later it was Germany 8 Italy 6, followed by twenty entirely goalless minutes with Germany looking favourites to play out time and win it, 8-6. Calm, mayhem, even greater mayhem in the opposite direction, calm. Bizarre, right? I’ll say.
Okay, here is my serious Samizdata-type point. (Welcome back, normals.)
My point is that the internet is uniting the world into one huge ultra-high-density global super-city. Not a global village, because that would suggest that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about, and, as the above few paragraphs illustrate very adequately, that is not at all what is happening. Most of us are baffled by most of what goes on in our Global Super-City, most of the time. But the thing is, cricket fans like me can now tune into the fine detail of matches which we would never before have been able to find out about. And you can likewise easliy tune into the fine detail of whatever it is that gets you excited and has you interrupting your normal daily routine. → Continue reading: Cape Town cricket mayhem in real time – and a united world
Incoming email from an acquaintance:
I just saw Robert Peston on the BBC 1 News at 10pm. He was recommending that the ECB come to the rescue of Italy and Greece on the ground that it is the only EU institution “capable of creating unlimited resources”. Not unlimited money; unlimited resources! It’s magic.
Somebody should Occupy the BBC.
A BIT LATER: I just googled “ecb unlimited resources”. Alas, plenty of hits. Try it. Peston is only expressing a general mood. A general mood of complete insanity, but a general mood.
The world’s financial system, run by institutions that were a few short years ago considered to be too big to fail but which are now too big to bail, is collapsing. But, the making of mere things, not now nearly so fatally deranged by government imposed regulations or corrupted by government supplied moral hazards, continues to flourish. Will thing-making survive the financial turmoil of the next few years? Who knows? Meanwhile, it has been and it remains a good time to be alive and thing-using.
A thing I particularly enjoy using is my digital camera. However, my current camera feels a bit ancient, and I believe I could now get a better one. But which? In this posting I solicit advice on the matter.
Very roughly, there are now three types of digital camera. There are the little ones like face powder cases which people carry for fun, such cameras often nowadays being included in mobile phones. At the other extreme, there are the SLRs with a small mountain of lenses you can attach to them, for people who, facing the choice between life and photography, have chosen photography. And then there are cameras for people like me, who adore photography but who also want lives. What we want is the absolute best camera we can have, without having to swap lenses all the time.
Well, that’s how it sometimes seems to me. To be more polite to the SLR crowd, it may be more a matter of how they like to photograph, compared to how I like to. They photograph slowly and carefully and infrequently. I photograph voraciously and opportunistically, one moment snapping something right under my nose (like a mad safety notice), and the next moment wanting to capture something I spot in the far distance (like a big new tower with something else amusing in the shot between it and me – often involving a trick of the light which may vanish at any moment), and I never know which it will be until I see it. You can surely appreciate how annoying swapping lenses back and forth would be for me. What I want is one super-versatile lens, which I can either make erect or flaccid depending on distance, within about one second. For the SLR fraternity, artistic impression and precision of image is all. For me, those are good, but the point of the snap is what is being snapped. So long as you can see that okay, usually in a photo that I include in a blog posting, good enough, technically speaking, is, for me, good enough.
For several years now I have had a Canon S5 IS, and very satisfactory it has been. But now, things have moved on, and I can now get a technically much improved camera, with does much better pictures and has massively more zoom, hardly any bigger and while still not having to faff about with those lenses.
Those who think I am wrong and that I should get an SLR can comment away to that effect all they like, but I will pay no attention. What I want is comments about what I am now looking at. And what I am now looking at is two cameras of the sort that I have just described, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ150 and the Canon SX40 HS.
There are already an abundance of reviews of these two beasts on line, including even reviews like this, which compare the two head to head. But, I would love to know what our commentariat is able to tell me about this choice, before I go ahead and make it. → Continue reading: Which superzoom camera should I now buy?
Most politicians don’t know any better. They certainly don’t know any economics. So the same toxic policy mix of Keynesian deficit spending and Monetarist money printing has been implemented around the world since this crisis started four years ago. Just like in any other recession of the past forty years, ever since Nixon cut the last link to gold and fulfilled every interventionist’s wildest fantasy: unlimited paper money under full control of the state! Yeah, baby, no more recessions!
Alas, it is not working, is it?
Rates were cut and the state did not only spent money it didn’t have, as usual, it spent much more money it didn’t have. But the economy did not recover. So more of this policy was implemented. And then, more again. In fact, by any standard, never before in modern times has the economy been ‘stimulated’ more through Keynesian and Monetarist government intervention than over the past four years. Balance sheets of major central banks have tripled, banks have been receiving limitless funds for free and will continue to do so forever, and governments are running deficits the likes of which mankind has only ever seen at the height of major wars, and which are increasingly funded by the printing press.
It is still not working.
You would probably guess that the interventionists of Keynesian and other ilk would be a bit more humble by now. Maybe check a few of those premises in their models? Or maybe start thinking again about those elusive explanations for what’s wrong with the economy in the first place? Are we really suffering from a lack of paper money and government spending? Maybe it is not simply down to all of us being too depressed, morose, and in need of some policy Prozac. Maybe something else is broken.
Alas, no. The academically trained Keynesian economist is too committed to his or her beliefs to let the facts get in the way. Why has policy not worked? Because, wait for it, we have been too timid. We need the same policy. We just need more of it. A lot more.
– from the latest Schlichter File, posted today.
LATER: See also this recent interview with Schlichter.
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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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