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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As briefly mentioned in a post below, people – a lot of them who seemed to be classical liberal stirrers like yours truly – gathered in the sun-lit gardens in front of the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, to witness the unveiling of a statue of Ronald Reagan. I like this editorial in CityAM by Allister Heath, who signs off with these two paragraphs. His comment about JF Kennedy is very much on point:
“In fact, Reagan wasn’t even that original. The best exposition of how tax cuts can reinvigorate an economy remains Democratic president John F Kennedy’s spectacular 1964 reforms, which reduced the top rate from 94 per cent to 70 per cent (Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, of course, but his tax cuts were agreed prior to his death). Two years later, the federal tax haul was 11 per cent higher than forecast: more people made more money and their taxable efforts more than compensated for the reduced tax rate. Kennedy had been proved spectacularly right when he had argued that “an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
“In 1981, Reagan reduced the top rate of income tax to 50 per cent. In 1986, he cut it again to 28 per cent. Of course, this benefited the richest disproportionately – but they nevertheless ended up shouldering a greater tax burden and paying for a greater proportion of public spending. The share of tax raised from the best-paid 1 per cent jumped from 19 per cent in 1980 to 25.6 per cent in 1990. The moral: to squeeze more tax out of the rich, lower the top tax thresholds. We learnt that in Britain starting in 1979 – but with top earners now taxed at 52 per cent and millions paying 42 per cent, the lessons have been forgotten again. Britain needs to discover its very own Ronald Reagan, a hopeful, optimistic, pro-individual liberty, pro-growth politician with an uncanny ability to communicate. Any takers?”
Well said. In a spirit of fairness, though, I link to an interview with Reagan’s former budget director, David Stockman, who is a fierce critic of the deficits (he also strikes me as somewhat embittered). I am not sure if his call for tax rises in the absence of any serious spending cuts is going to find any welcoming audience. I also think Stockman is far too dismissive of the fact that because of the Reagan supply-side tax cuts, revenues boomed.
As Heath says, hero-worship is something any genuine liberal should avoid. The list of heroes in public affairs is, as far as I can judge, short. Reagan is one of them.
“Will militant unions derail big fat Greek sell-offs on the rocky route to recovery?” sayeth the Telegraph.
Well anyone buying Greek infrastructures with private money deserves everything they will get… it would be easier and probably less stressful to just flush the money down the toilet and call it ‘performance art’.
Leave Greece to circle the drain as a prime example of Mencken’s observation:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard”.
Greece will just be the first of many as the vast ponzi scheme that is the ‘welfare state’ reaches its climax set to Bouzouki music playing faster and faster…
An interesting item about how economists influenced by the teachings of the late JM Keynes are falling out with one another.
Here is a quote worth pondering from Henry Hazlitt: “Keynes constantly deplored saving while praising investment, persistently forgetting that the second was impossible without the first.” Page 203, The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt.
Too many of our internet dreams depend on the internet being far less vulnerable to governments than it actually is.
– August, commenting on a posting at my place about Bitcoin.
I suggest comments about what August says about the internet: here. Bitcoin comments: there.
I see that my fourth (approximately, I think) cousin John Micklethwait, Editor of the Economist, whom our own Paul Marks disapproves of so severely, is this weekend attending a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.
I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering.
When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of the global elite would have exploded. After all, detailed analysis of these persons and their thinkings and their doings was the quintessential Story They Don’t Want Us To Know, in other words, a story that was ready-made for the internet.
Yet, actually, very little was said about these persons and their meetings and their secret thinkings aloud, by regular people as opposed to the people who were already fascinated by such things. Oh, I’m sure that the people who had been banging on about the evil Bilderbergers for the previous quarter of a century immediately started publishing vast screeds about these persons on the internet. But, or so it seems to me, very few other people paid such talk very much attention. And so, pretty much, it has continued.
Why? Was it because bloggers who dipped their toes into these hitherto forbidden waters were visited by sinister people in sinister raincoats at sinister times of the night? Did those who mentioned the Bilderberg Group on the internet suffer mysteriously fatal road accidents?
I can’t speak for others, but the thing that kept me away from talking about Bilderberg meetings and similar things was not the fear of Them, but the desire not to be thought completely mad, by people generally. → Continue reading: Is the globe now ready to start thinking seriously about its elite?
Newspaper headlines photoed by me today, in London:
For a more considered view of the economic picture, try Detlev Schlichter, who now seems to be the unofficial Samizdata economics correspondent, who has another posting up today, about, ah yes, inflation.
But the good news is that not all prices are rising.
Photoed by me yesterday, in London:
The original price of this book was £10.99. I guess people now realise that it didn’t have a happy ending.
Perhaps the answer is going to be to keep warm by burning books.
“Auction houses and auction websites make markets out of common objects that would be trash except for a celebrity having owned or used or once touched it. A set of golf clubs or a box of golf balls is worth far more in a pro shop if the brand name “Tiger Woods” is on the label, because by affixing the name of the golf legend the buyer is being told that Tiger Woods had personal input into the quality of the products. Anyone who copies that box of golf balls with the Tiger Woods label on it — without proper authorization — is committing an act of forgery.”
J. Neil Schulman.
He certainly has an unusual way of looking at IP. This issue is messing with my head. A few weeks ago, I read Tim Sandefur’s lucid take on the matter, and took the view that whatever else can be said about it, it is hard to see how I could make a “natural rights” claim for IP in the same way as some classical liberals can do with physical property. But a few days later, talking to an old friend who is a professional arbitrator, my view swung more favourably to this sort of argument, as presented in favour by the late, great Lysander Spooner.
I fear that with IP, this is going to be one of those “I haven’t really made up my mind yet” positions. I suspect I am not alone.
My favourite bit in the Eagleton piece that Natalie links to below is this:
British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, …
Does it not occur to Eagleton that perhaps the British universities that all these wicked bankers and financiers attended educated them rather badly? While at university, Britain’s future financial elite were taught to accept a false view of the economic world. Now this elite “plunders” (as in “cuts the government grants of”) its educators.
The educators educated the elite. The elite screwed up horribly, and now the educators are getting screwed themselves. The educators are appalled at this terrible ingratitude, this horrible injustice. What have they done to deserve this? I say: quite a lot. You teach financially ruinous ideas. The people you taught them to turn round and ruin you. I say: it serves you right. I say: that’s just about the most perfect punishment there could be for what you have been doing.
My only worry is that things are actually not as bad as Eagleton says, and that Britain’s universities are in fact not being punished nearly enough for the financial ruin that they did so much to unleash upon the rest of us.
Never mind he is debasing the currency and starting us on the road to runaway inflation, is functionally indistinguishable from Tony Blair and his ‘savage cuts’ are a fiction simply parroted by a mainstream media seeming unable to do simple math… he has ‘Ease and authority’
Well, phew, good to know! I guess we’ll be ok then!
– Perry de Havilland commenting on a Telegraph blog article claiming that “Ease and authority make David Cameron hard to beat“
… no, I am not talking about his, er, other talents but rather the clarity of his economic analysis…
Ladies and gentlemen, Guido presents the Great Inflation Swindle, we have just seen the second-biggest one-month increase on record and a record high in core CPI yet the Governor of the Bank of England has told us for 3 years inflation was a blip and that the real danger was deflation. It was a deliberate lie to excuse the most reckless monetary loosening since… well actually monetary policy has been too loose globally since back to 1998 when Greenspan “saved the world” after Long Term Capital’s financial theory geeks had a close encounter of the reality kind. The loosening up of monetary policy to smooth the aftermath of that hedge fund collapse told financial risk takers to rack up the risk because central banks would step in if you got in to trouble. Everyone was “too big to fail”. Central bankers turned capitalism from a system of profit and loss into a system of private profits and socialised losses. Taxpayers had their chips put on the gambling table without even being asked.
Read the whole thing.
Here is one of those quotes where you add “read the whole thing”:
But next time you are told that Osborne is imposing savage, reckless cuts on the UK, remember that the figures tell a different story. So far, spending is still going up. The plan is for total spending to go up in cash terms overall this financial year and to fall by 0.6 per cent in real terms (the measure that really matters). This will hurt, especially given that debt interest payments are soaring, reducing the funds available for public services by a lot more than the 0.6 per cent overall cut. But this should also be put into context. Barack Obama, who was in London yesterday, wants to cut public spending by 3.8 per cent next year, more than the 3.7 per cent pencilled in over four years by Osborne. In other words, Obama’s cuts – which many in the US want to make even larger – are four times larger than the average annual cuts proposed by slowcoach Osborne.
So it is no wonder really that the UK’s credit rating was downgraded yesterday by (wait for it) Chinese rating agency Dagong, which cut the UK by one notch to A+, from AA-, and placed it on a negative outlook. You may snigger – but unless the UK is able to deliver on its fiscal austerity not just this year but for the next four, our creditors will soon start panicking again, with good reason.
That’s Allister Heath, writing in the London giveaway newspaper, City A.M., which he edits. His point being that the journey in question has only just begun.
Read the whole thing. The above quote comes at the end. Before that come a few of the facts and the figures.
I suppose the optimistic take on all this is that you can’t wrench a graph that is going up onto a downward path, just like that. But how much wrenching is actually going on?
The main problem with having discussions about economics and financial markets is this: People look at these complex phenomena through entirely different prisms; they use vastly dissimilar – even contrasting – narratives as to what has happened, what is going on now, and what is therefore likely to happen in the future. Citing any so-called “facts” – statistical data, or the actions and statements of policymakers – in support of a specific interpretation and forecast is often a futile exercise: The same data point will be interpreted very differently if some other intellectual framework is being applied to it.
– The opening paragraph of Detlev Schlichter’s latest commentary on the state of the world, entitled Beyond Repair – This will not have a happy ending.
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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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