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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“Yes, we might all think that sending a virtual red rose over Facebook is silly but those sending them (and presumably to some extent those receiving them) do value them. And that value is what we measure when we talk about GDP and it is the creation of that value that allows people to make profits. There is absolutely nothing at all in the capitalist system, the free market one (these are two different things please note), the pursuit of profits or even continued economic growth that requires either the use of more limited physical resources or even the use of any non-renewable resource.”
Tim Worstall, nicely skewering the idea that economic growth is the same as ever rising consumption of finite resources. Not the same thing at all.
Well, for all you gold bugs out there, here is a spiffy new banking facility, although it so far is confined to the Gulf.
Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises would have approved, I’m sure. By the way, the price of gold is currently around $1,250, a new record. Given the various “quantitative easing” programmes of central banks in recent months, the hunger for the yellow metal is not surprising. I must say that at current levels, it does seem a pretty risky idea to push even more money into gold, since there has been so much of a rally already. If – and this is one hell of an if – some governments start to reduce their debt burdens and try to squeeze monetary growth in some parts of the world (like in Australia), then some of that “fear premium” in gold may start to fade.
Sam Bowman, whom I mentioned in my previous posting below about the IEA, responded by emailing me further proof that he is taking his Cobden Centre duties seriously:
The Cobden Centre Education Network is a new network of students in the UK interested in libertarian and classical liberal economics, especially the Austrian school. Working with the Cobden Centre it aims to connect libertarian and classical liberal students across the UK and help them develop their interests and involvement in classical liberalism and libertarianism.
This summer, the Cobden Centre Education Network will be hosting a series of seminars studying Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, a seminal work in Austrian economics that lays the foundation for further study of the Austrian school. The seminars will take place twice a month at the Institute for Economic Affairs in London, and Cobden Centre board members and fellows will join us for some sessions. Electronic copies of all reading materials and a study guide will be provided.
As well as being a unique opportunity to develop a comprehensive knowledge of the Austrian school, this will give Education Network members a chance to meet some of Britain’s foremost libertarian and classical liberal thinkers.
If you are interested in joining the Cobden Centre Education Network, please email Sam (sam @ cobden centre (all one word) dot org – I trust that will deter at least some spammers – BM) with your name, contact email address, and university and course if you are currently in education. Please also state if you are available to attend events during the summer in London.
Outstanding. And good on the IEA for lending them the place to do this.
Badgering politicians is worth a go, because you can get lucky, and because even if they don’t listen, someone else might, especially in an age when letters can double up as internet postings. But politicians will mostly just do their thing, which is fire fighting the fires on their desks within the limits set by public opinion, or by what they suppose to be public opinion, and within the limits that they all set amongst themselves. What matters is the long-term intellectual struggle, that is, the process of creating the limits within which politicians and other decision makers will operate in the future. The above enterprise is a fine example of how you go about doing that.
In the age of social media, blogs, emails and so on, it is tempting to suppose that personal contact is a bit superfluous. But I suspect that the most lasting impact of such novelties is creating and strengthening old fashioned face-to-face contacts, between people who might otherwise never have been introduced.
I wonder if there is an upper age limit.
The Institute of Economic Affairs is the mothership of the free market think tanks, certainly in Europe. Or, it was. Because now, the IEA’s reputation is almost entirely based on the stir that it managed to make when it was presided over by the stellar duopoly that was Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Those two men ensured that the classical liberal intellectual tradition remained alive in Britain, and they brought it, and the developing tradition of Austrian school economics, to bear on the failed Keynesian consensus of the 1960s and 1970s, laying the intellectual foundations for the Thatcherite economic rescue act of the 1980s.
Harris and Seldon had always been very careful, first, to ground their activities in pro freedom scholarship. The intellectual war was what they cared about most. Seldon fought that war. Harris, although also a considerable warrior himself, concentrated on making sure that the war effort was paid for. Second, they were careful not to get too closely intertwined with the Conservative Party, to the exclusion of any others. They always kept their lines open to anyone who was willing to listen to what they had to say and to help them say it, of any party or of none.
However, when age inevitably caught up with Harris and Seldon, the IEA then chose a man called Graham Mather as its new boss, who proceeded to use the place as his personal campaign office to turn himself into a Conservative MEP, while declaring that “the intellectual arguments have been won”. Mather was hurriedly dumped, and under John Blundell’s leadership the IEA then did rather better, even if it never really lit up the landscape like it had in the old days. To switch metaphors from fireworks to aviation, under Mather, the IEA was crashing earthwards and was about to burn up completely. Under Blundell it glided near horizontally, not at all disastrously, but without any upward impetus that I could see. When I heard that the Institute of Economic Affairs had, however long ago it was, appointed as their new boss Mark Littlewood, whose previous job was as a media relations person for the LibDems, I reacted with indifference. I hardly, that is to say, reacted at all.
Mark Littlewood has clearly always understood what classical liberalism and libertarianism are all about, and has done as much of them as he could, given the day jobs he has had. He has always been a friendly and civilised presence, albeit rather too EUrophile for my liking, at the various Libertarian Alliance events I have seen him at over the years, at quite a few of which he has spoken. Nevertheless, I assumed that in hiring such a person, the IEA was merely going to throw a big chunk of its still impressive stash of money at a pointless media-based charm offensive, which would achieve nothing. Pick a nice chap, with lots of contacts in politics and in what they used to call Fleet Street, hope for the best and get nothing very much. After a few years, Littlewood would move on. In due course, the building would be sold and the IEA would move from Westminster to somewhere or to nowhere. Its few surviving supporters would become even more geriatric. Another member of the Political Class, more unscrupulous than Mark Littlewood and cut from the same cloth as Graham Mather, would move in and hoover up all the remaining money, and that would be that. Way of the world. Old order giving place to new. Such is life. Such is death.
I never really thought any of this through, apart from the Mather episode, when I became tangentially involved as a junior advocate for the team that ousted him. I merely realise, now, that the above sentiments about Littlewood were what I was thinking, insofar as I was thinking anything at all. The point being that as far as the IEA was concerned, and like many others, I had pretty much stopped thinking.
So it was that when I got invited to a Libertarian Alliance dinner about a fortnight ago, at which Mark Littlewood was to speak about how he was setting about his various IEA tasks, I did not, as they say, jump at the invitation. I merely, having nothing else fixed, said yes and went along, expecting little more than some nice food. But as soon as Mark Littlewood started talking, I realised that I had been seriously misjudging him. → Continue reading: Mark Littlewood and the future of the Institute of Economic Affairs
This sounds like the kind of thing that our own Michael Jennings is fond of saying:
“I was recently waiting for a flight in Delhi, when I overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now do I realise that they were speaking “Globish”, the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.”
That’s journalist Ben Macintyre, quoted by Robert McCrum, in a recent Guardian piece about the global evolution of the English language. But, McCrum then asks, will English, having spread so widely, and like Latin before it, then fragment into distinct languages? Or will the effect of what is loosely called globalisation mean that enough English speakers who start with their local variant of English will want then to move towards a more internationally tradeable, so to speak, version of English, and make the effort? Will they try to add some of that grammar and structure that Ben Macintyre spoke of? And will global standard English, particularly as spoken by the more globe-trotting sort of American and in due course by most Anglos, itself hold out its hand, as it were, making its own effort, and come half way to meet Globish, to ensure that English, although changing faster than ever before, nevertheless remains one language, or at least one linguistic continuum? Will English, in other words, keep on pulling itself together? Note that Ben Macintyre had no problem understanding the Globish that he heard in Delhi, and would presumably have no problem speaking like that.
My guess is that there are powerful unifying forces at work here, as well as fragmenting forces. What follows began life as a separate posting, and was mostly written before I encountered the above article. → Continue reading: Bangalore changing to Bengaluru says that English will keep on pulling itself together
Can it be? Do my eyes deceive me? An MP… a Tory MP… who seems to have a grasp of economics!
How long before this guy gets a visit from the party whip advising him that insightful talk about real world economics might be harmful to his career, capice?
The $146 billion bailout package approved this weekend for Greece is advertised as a move to “stop the worst crisis in the [euro]’s 11-year history,” but it is having exactly the opposite effect.
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So you have politicians defying the will of the voters to pour more water into a leaky bucket; transnational economic planners destroying a currency in order to save it; markets responding to those actions with predictable horror; and the few recipients of all the largesse too dumb to say “Thank you.” This is apparently what EU stability looks like.
– The start and the finish (I recommend the stuff in between as well) of a piece by Tim Cavanaugh about the Greek Bailout
Via Arnold Kling at the EconLog blog, is his plan to fix the US financial system. It applies with equal force to the UK, I think, apart from one or two specifics. It is not the sort of more radical measure that the likes of Kevin Dowd has favoured, but it is pretty good and it actually is something I could envisage being attempted. I even think it might be possible to contemplate a partial breakup of the banking system to avoid a “too big to fail” issue although I would caution that bigness, per se, is not the problem. What is the problem is the fractional banking system as it now operates under the moral hazard regime of a central bank, legal tender laws, and the rest.
Excerpt:
“The overarching principle I have is that we should try to make the financial system easy to fix. The more you try to make it harder to break, the more recklessly people will behave. By reducing the incentives for debt finance and for exotic finance, you help promote a financial system that breaks the way the Dotcom bubble broke, with much lesser secondary consequences.”
Anyway, something for the politicians to ponder.
Here is a related post of mine a few weeks ago about the need to push the case for free market banking even though the details can be sometimes overtaken by events.
Over at the Stumbling and Mumbling blog, the author asks this question, after watching an interesting TV programme about the sort of free market activities he sees going on in bits of Africa:
“Why is it that the societies that come closest to the libertarian ideal are poor ones, rather than rich? (It would, I think, be a stretch to argue that libertarianism causes poverty in this case). What is it about wealthier societies that brings with them bigger government?”
I think this can be fairly easily explained: as countries get richer, their voters think – naively – they can afford to have big government, at least until they start to hit those sort of problems that we have encountered in the West in recent decades with government overload. In the US, for example, the country became so rich, relatively, after the Second World War that things like the Great Society reforms, or the Space Program, were easier to contemplate and the risks and costs could be shrugged off, at least for a while. I guess what happens is that after a burst of wealth creation – as in the UK’s Industrial Revolution – part of the population that has made a lot of money wants to ease up, or wants to turn to the easier, and possibly more exciting, realm of politics.
I sometimes notice that some of the noisiest anti-libertarians, such as many academics in the universities, live in the US, the world’s richest nation, and I think the two things are in fact connected. If you have an incredibly wealthy country, it spawns a lot of folk who have the inherited wealth, the time, and the inclination, to make a living outside the immediate commercial system, and hence, will argue for something different. You can see this in certain family businesses: the Alpha Male type sets it up and makes a shedload of money; the son is sent to a posh school and starts to want to be part of the Establishment and is teased by his schoolfriends for being in “trade”. The next son may end up in the professions, and as such, will tend to be drawn towards the State, or at least take a more benign view of state power than granddad. And I think this is partly what happened in the UK in the second half of the 19th Century and into most of the 20th Century. Part of the “business class” that might be expected to form the backbone of a free market order got housetrained by a remarkably conservative, ruralist, anti-commerce establishment. (This book makes such a case, for example).
There is also the issue of “correlation is not causation”. Just because big government can sometimes be seen in wealthy societies in no way proves that the former helps bring about the latter, or vice versa. Stumbling and Mumbling implies that libertarianism, being what it thinks might be a simple-minded creed, cannot work in a sophisticated, wealthy society. In fact, I’d argue quite the reverse: the more complex a society is with a complex division of labour and profusion of individual tastes and demands, the less effectively big government tends to work. In fact, there are plenty of examples of rich societies with a relatively small government – perhaps Hong Kong being one of the best examples.
The CATO Institute’s annual index of freedom report also suggests a pretty close relationship between countries that are rich and where the government focuses on the core, minarchist roles of protecting life and property, enforcing contracts, preventing fraud, etc. That does rather undermine the point made in the comment I link to.
It is, of course, excellent news if it is true that parts of Africa are heading down the pro-market route. But using such examples to make a bit of a dig against the wider application of classical liberal ideas is unfounded.
I like this article by Tim Cavanagh over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog:
This is the problem with the new declinism. With no compelling vision of the apocalypse that doesn’t involve zombies, cyborgs, or outlaw bikers, we tend to miss something obvious: The problem isn’t that things are collapsing. It’s that not enough things are collapsing. General Motors, AIG, and the government of California have committed enough errors to merit immediate extinction, but there they still are. Yet the political establishment continues to argue that the market needs to be prevented from delivering rough justice to sinners. President Obama, who one year ago gave us a worst-case scenario in which an unstimulated economy might hit 8 percent unemployment by this year, now presides over 10 percent unemployment but tries to bamboozle us with counterfactuals like this doozy from the 2010 State of the Union address: “If we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today.”
He’s making a good point. Much of the current mess has been caused by policymakers, such as Greenspan/Bernanke at the Fed, or our own benighted Gordon Brown, trying to “rescue” a failed system by throwing huge amounts of money into the system to prevent disaster, only to build up even greater woes in the future. Going bankrupt is never nice, but by freeing up resources and more to the point, by making people learn from their mistakes, it is a healthy process. To borrow from Karl Popper, if we don’t allow bad investment theories to be falsified by events, then the market will fall short in one of its most powerful functions, of generating valuable new information.
Incoming email from fellow Samizdatista Michael, just received:
This morning, I forgot to pack the charger for my laptop before heading for the airport. Therefore, once the battery had run down, I was faced with the real possibility of being without a computer for a week.
The horror, the horror.
Obviously, this could not stand, so I needed a charger. I had to do this is Rzeszow in Poland, or perhaps in Lviv in the Ukraine tomorrow. (Lviv is a bigger city, but Ukraine is a more backward country). After trying a few local stores, and a branch of Media Markt (the German equivalent of Curry’s), I eventually found a universal laptop charger. I found it in a branch of an obscure, East European chain named “Tesco”. The price was very reasonable, too.
“Markt”? Is that proper spelling, or just email spelling?
I have no idea whatsoever why so many people in places like London find the spread of Tesco – really a wonderful company – to be such a bad thing.
Well, here are some ideas. They are snobs who only want good stuff to be available to richer people such as themselves? They are anti-capitalist scum who hate humans and want humans to die out, but only after they have died first? They oppose international free trade in food (or in anything) and blame Tesco for it? They used to run inefficient food shops that sold stale and overpriced food, until Tesco drove them out of business?
I’m sure commenters can suggest further motivations for Tescophobia.
Allister Heath, over at CityAM, the free daily newspaper with a strong financial twist, seems at times to be about the only journalist in London making a robust case for free market capitalism, limited government and low taxes. Given how such a message is almost deemed off limits these days in the Conservative Party, and even City types seem shy about doing so, Allister’s editorials are a rare blast of good sense. He’s on good form today with this:
“Economics is not always intuitive – and that is what makes it such a fascinating and important discipline. Take what economists call “incidence” – the study of who actually bears the burden of a particular tax. It is obvious enough that employees pay income tax. But it is much harder to actually work out who really ends up paying for other taxes; voters are often fooled into thinking that somebody else, usually big business, is being hit by higher taxes while in fact it is them who are picking up the tab, albeit in a way that is impossible to detect.”
Exactly. With a lot of economic arguments, such as law of comparative advantage, the insight is not immediately obvious. That is why, for example, protectionist politicians can win votes by claiming that those evil foreigners are “taking our jobs” – it takes a bit of understanding to see the fallacy in this. And the tax incidence issue that is highlighted here is a good one. There is not just a tax incidence effect where a tax on a sector, such as banks, hits everyone. There is also regulatory incidence too. I don’t know exact numbers, but all the various health, safety, equality, and other rules that are imposed on firms add greatly to the total cost of buying a product. Consider how much of the regulatory burden, for example, translates into the actual price you pay for a car, fridge, or even step-ladder.
So the Tories, in their bid for power, want to impose a tax on banks, and imagine that most voters will cheer and say, “good on yer iDave, give the banks a hard time!” and then fail to join the dots when they wonder why the interest on their accounts is so poor, or why it seems a bit harder to get a loan these days or why buying foreign exchange appears to be a rip-off.
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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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