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Via such blogs as this one (see the list of recent postings on other blogs), and this one (the previous list being how I got to that blog), I today encountered a video of someone called Ian Plimer plugging his latest book, which is called Heaven and Earth. Watch it here.
And here (via this posting) is a piece about an Aussie politician who seems to be following Plimer’s lead.
I am no scientist, and politically I am heavily in favour of the free market capitalism that the Green Movement wants to shut down or at least castrate. So I would say all this. But I can honestly say that I find Plimer more convincing than those persons who talk about climate change as if the urgent need now is to stop all climate change (impossible) of as if those who doubt their prophecies of apocalypse (such as me) believe that climate is not now changing. The climate always changes.
Plimer is eloquent, and relatively brief. Even pro-AGW greenies would find this, I think, a quite useful short compendium of all the arguments against their views, in fact they already are using it this way. That’s if they are interested in answering arguments, as some are.
The clearest insight that I personally got from this video performance was Plimer’s claim that the AGW (as in anthropogenic global warming) people are all atmospheric scientists (insofar as they are scientists at all), who are plugging their apocalypse without looking at any other kinds of scientific evidence, or much in the way of historical evidence either. He also says that this particular evidence is itself very threadbare, but that is a distinct argument that I have long known about.
I was also interested that Professor Donald Blainey [Correction: Geoffrey Blainey], an Australian historian whom I have long admired, is in his turn an admirer of Plimer’s book. Big plus, for me.
Plimer is optimistic that the current economic woes, woes that really are now being experienced by our entire species if not our entire planet, together with the little bit of cooling that has recently been happening, will concentrate people’s minds on what a load of humbug the AGW scare is. No doubt pessimists commenting here will say that the damage has already been done, and will take decades to undo. I’ll pass on that argument.
I now guess that the next argument for AGW here in Britain is going to be that since the BNP also says AGW is humbug, it must be true.
How has the current Western political class come into being?
What economic, social, historical, cultural, technological or other factors have contributed to its growth and ascendancy?
Calling a Roman Emperor a possible father of the West is problematic enough, but one from the late Empire is especially problematic.
Since the time of Diocletian peasants, the great majority of Roman citizens, had not been allowed to leave their farms – as it was feared they might be trying to dodge taxes by doing so. And since the time of Constantine it was “legal” to put peasants in chains if they were suspected of planing to leave.
And, of course, anyone below the rank of Senator was open to flogging and torture if Imperial officials felt such treatment was needed to get a confession for a crime or just to inspire greater tax revenue. Technically a town councillor could not be treated in this way, but such old fashioned legal technicalities were largely a dead letter in the late Empire. And even Senators could be flogged, tortured and murdered if the Emperor felt like it – because his will was law. In a way that baffled some barbarian tribesmen – who were used to a tribal chief not being able to change the basic laws of the tribe whenever he felt like it.
Roman legal practice (both due to the arbitary will of Emperors and the degenerate thinking of scholars) had long become infested with notions like the “just price” (of which there are traces even under the Republic) – defined not as a price freely arrived at by buyer and seller (an interpretation of the “just price” that one can see in one tradition of Roman law going from Classical times up through such things as Bavarian law in the 8th century, right to our own times) but as some “correct price” for bread (and other products), laid down by the arbitrary will of the ruler – in a way such tyrants as Charles the Great of the Franks (Charlemagne) and his pet scholars would have approved of centuries later.
Nor was Valentinian himself a gentle man – for example the punishment he brought in for trying to avoid conscription was to be burnt alive. Nor did Valentinian think of removing the ban on the private ownership, and training with, weapons – which under the Republic was just as much the mark of a free man, as it was among the Saxons or other such tribes.
Valentinian is also attacked for his “old fashioned” concentration on the frontier – building forts and other such, and stationing his best troops in the frontier areas (and leading them himself till he dropped dead of the strain of command). Rather than the enlightened “defence in depth” conception favoured by Emperors like Constantine.
The attack on Valentinian military policy is, however, wrong headed. At the time when men either marched or rode on horseback to war modern “defence in depth” ideas were not really an option. The main armies had to be on the frontiers or invasions would destroy whole provinces before “strategic reserves” could come up. After all just sending message for help could take weeks.
Nor was Constantine really thinking about “defence in depth”. He created an elite army (with the best troops and equipment) and positioned them round himself in his new capital (Constantinople) to guard against frontier commanders doing what he himself had done – leading a military revolt against the Emperor. His plan was a political, not a military, one.
But just being correct on the military question would not make Valentinian a father of the West – after all the Roman Empire fell and (given the degenerate nature of the late Empire) probably had to fall for the West to be born. So Valentinian was, in the end, a failure and we should not be sad that only a few years after his death the Visigoths sacked Rome. Although this “in the long term it was for the best” thinking does leave aside the horror of the barbarian invasions themselves – and the fact that much of civilization was lost. For example Roman notions of sanitation (not a small point) only really returned to Europe in the mid 19th century.
And lastly I can not even claim that Valentinian did not add some statist ideas of his own. For example he set up a free medical service – and although it was only 12 doctors servicing the poor of the city of Rome (itself only a small percentage of the population of the Empire) this was yet another expense the Empire could have done without. And yet another betrayal of the old, pre “bread and games”, Republic of independent families and voluntary association – at least the voluntary association of citizens.
So why the claim that Valentinian may have been one of the fathers of the West?
There are two reasons… → Continue reading: The Emperor Valentinian: A father of the West?
The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the “Westminster Village” (see also: “Westminster Bubble”) somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, “Westminster Village”, right there in the title.
So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?
Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn’t be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention – if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against – to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must “move on”. We mustn’t be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.
And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various “reforms” of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do is drop dead, not just because of Smeargate, but because of, well, everything.
With far greater force, as was appropriate to a far greater evil, I felt this about the old USSR. The USSR, I believed, was smashable, and I believed this before it was actually smashed. I further believed, during the 1980s, that smashing the USSR was one of the very few big yet almost unambiguously good things that the world then was capable of administering to itself. Magic buttons in politics are rare, but here was one. The USSR, then and ever since it had begun, blighted everything. Nothing else could be effectively dealt with until it was dealt with. All the other problems (notably Islamic terrorism) were being inflamed by that one big problem, namely the apparently relentless arm-wrestling that then dominated world politics, between the USSR and the civilised world. And, to repeat, that one big problem, the continuing existence of the USSR, had one huge advantage over most other problems then or since. It was fairly easily solvable. The USSR was worth breaking because, in the word of Gordon Gecko, it was breakable. A few more well-aimed shoves and over it would crash. Accordingly, I and all other anti-Soviet elements at that time brandished whatever weapons we could find at that evil empire, threw whatever mud at it that came to hand. In my case that meant writing and publishing little pamphlets about such things as how the USSR was both worthy of being broken and breakable. (I probably contributed even more by have an unusual surname and a father, “Sir Robert” if you please, who was once upon a time in MI6. What else was I doing? Nothing as it happened. But they didn’t know that.)
In my recollection, nobody accused all us anti-Soviets at that time of being obsessed with the “Moscow Bubble”, but we were certainly accused of being obsessed with the USSR, and told that there was a world out there, full of “real problems”, and that we should stop being so monomaniacal about just the one mere government, disagreeable though it was. I agreed entirely about all those other problems, but believed that a huge step in the right direction, a huge step towards making all those other problems that little bit easier to get to grips with, would be to sweep the USSR from the board. Just smash it to rubble. I rejoiced then when that was done. I rejoice still that it was done. The post-Soviet news agenda hasn’t been a hundred per cent good, but it would take a month of blog postings to even begin to count all the ways in which the USSR’s collapse has made the world a better place.
On a far smaller scale and in a history-repeating-itself-as-farce kind of way, I now feel the same thing about the Gordon Brown government. Yes, there are a thousand problems out there that the British government and the wider British political debate ought to be addressing. Of course there are. And I will continue to try to find time and brain-space to blog about them too, just as I often wrote about other things besides the desirability of smashing the USSR during the 1980s. I would be very sorry if all other Samizdatistas were as monomaniacally fascinated by Smeargate as I now find that I am, and note with satisfaction that they are not. Nevertheless, here is a battle that both should be won and can be won. Quite soon now, it will be won. And the sooner it is won, and the more completely and dramatically and unforgettably it is won, the better. Once it is, we can all get back to arguing about all the other important stuff, without the chaos that is this present government screwing everything up, by the simple, sordid fact of its continuing existence.
So now, about that Derek Draper fellow …
Having neither the time nor the energy left to do a properly thoughtful posting, but still wanting to do a posting, what with everyone else here seeming to be out having a life, I went looking. And eventually I found this intriguingly quasi-optimistic thought, in a comment from someone called David Tomlin on this David Friedman piece.
The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.
In five or ten thousand years, if the human race still exists, I expect most people will be living in anarchist or minarchist societies, and other societies will be considered backward, as dictatorships are today.
Perhaps that is more like a thought for Easter Sunday rather than for Good Friday, but the times are depressing enough already.
Personally, I don’t see why such improvement need take as long as those kinds of numbers. I reckon a thousand years ought to be plenty.
Further thoughts from me, about the cogitations of another member of the Friedman dynasty, here.
Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said. Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.
From a nice article on revisionist accounts of the New Deal and Roosevelt.
Via Marginal Revolution, which has a quite good comment thread on this issue.
Talk of Warren Harding, a much maligned president, reminds me of Paul Johnson’s book, Modern Times, in which that president gets a much-overdue rehabilitation, along with Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge.
The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday’s Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil.
But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:
The pirate stations were not killed off by a Tory public-school prime minister (as in the film), but by a grammar school boy and Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and the destruction was not carried out by a Tory toff minister (as in the Curtis version), but by a left-wing toff, Tony Benn (then Labour minister in charge of the airwaves).
Yes, that’s certainly how I remember the story.
. . . the pirate stations were shut not by a stuffy Tory establishment, but by a supposedly modernising Labour government. Fact really is stranger than fiction.
I don’t think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis’s plot are strange. “Modernising Labour governments” think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can – capitalism.
See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too.
My post below on the experience of Scottish banking before 1845 – when the rules were changed by the-then UK government of Robert Peel – elicited a lot of great comments. It turns out that the Lawrence White paper that I mentioned had been savaged fairly thoroughly by Murray Rothbard. Rothbard’s paper is immensely detailed and shows what a thorough economic historian Rothbard was. Briefly put, he says that White has misinterpreted the Scottish banking experience by not distinguishing between free banks that operated 100 per cent reserve requirements linked to gold, and those that were simply free banks without such specie requirements. (Rothbard was an advocate of such metal-backed money). This inevitably raises that old friend of ours, fractional reserve banking, which Rothbard described as essentially a fraud. Now in trying to make up my mind on FRB, it seems to me that so long as the holder of bank notes is made aware that the note has been issued by an FRB, rather than a 100-percent reserves one, then what is the problem? It is a bit like the argument about limited liability corporations that vex some libertarians such as Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. Surely, if I transact with a LL company and knowingly do so, then such consent is what counts. LL companies could, conceivably, exist even without special government legislation, although they might not last as long as LL firms do now. (Here is a rejoinder to Gabb on LL). Same with FRB: if there is commercial deposit insurance and customers know the score, I fail to see why the existence of fractional banking should necessarily lead to disaster. Or is there something I am missing in this debate?
At first blush, some might consider all this to be a bit arcane. It is anything but. Explaining how banks work now, and how they can be made to work much better as a result of competition and basic rules, will go some way, I hope, to destroying misconceptions. Such misunderstandings that exist at the moment only play into the hands of those who want to bring the free market order down. Such as those folk protesting at the G20 summit in London today. I will be in the area on business. I might take some photos and post them up later if they are any good.
Update: I was in the Docklands area. Nothing much going on while I was there.
Those good people at the Institute of Economic Affairs have put this fine study of free banking, as it existed in Scotland until the middle of the 19th Century, back into print. It is examined in great detail, with lots of figures and examples of how these banks operated, how many bank failures there were, and so forth. There are a few equations but nothing that should faze all but the most mathematically challenged. Historical scholarship of this detail and depth is vital. It is as vital, in fact, as those studies that showed that in Victorian Britain, before the Welfare State came along, Britain already had an extensive network of mutual aid societies. Without this historical memory, it becomes easier for politicians to sell the lie that the solution to X or Y lies in ever bigger government.
Readers can either read the pdf for free or, if it is tough on the eyesight, as it is for me, readers can get a publication-on-demand sorted out for just £10.
I do not suggest that free banking is necessarily the panacea for the current troubles. But it seems to me that a point lost on the anti-globalistas as well as many of the other critics of the current financial system is that they fail to grasp how banking, as it is practised in most instances today, has deviated from a genuine example of laissez faire capitalism. What we need is sound money, administered by banks operating under the constant blast of competition in proving the soundness of that money. When you think about it, it is not very hard to grasp the idea, is it?
Our mother having made her final exit from it twelve days ago, the Visigothic sacking of her house by her children process has now gone into overdrive, and all sorts of odd objects have come to light.
My favourite discovery so far is this:
We wondered just how old that might be. Late forties? Maybe earlier? We quickly found a big clue on the lid:
Nothing says World War quite like a rusty tin of powdered milk, with a note on it from the government about metal conservation, not for reasons of environmental holiness but to make weapons! Truly, a vivid reminder of the ordeals that Mum’s generation endured. At that time, she was raising two young children. By 1947 she had four.
Are we now being plunged by our current idiot government into a similar state of austerity, and will more powdered milk from across the Atlantic soon be needed? If so, will America be either willing or able to provide it?
Virginia Postrel has a nice item about WW2 aviator style and the Tuskegee airmen who broke racial barriers of their time in WW2. I must say that there is something deliciously satisfying at the thought that these guys helped shoot down the airforce of a racist German empire. And that they flew such glorious birds like the P-51 Mustang as they did so.
Talking to fellow contributor Brian Micklethwait last night, we somehow got on the subject of the recent property and debt market bubble, and what a total mess things were. And Brian pointed out that some market bubbles, like the infamous Dutch tulip bubble of the 17th Century, were based on almost a totally ridiculous notion, delivering nothing of value, whereas at least the tech bubble of the 1990s, for all of the associated craziness and subsequent pain of the crash, did at least propel a lot of useful innovation in the internet and associated world, just as the railway boom of the 1840s in the UK helped drive forward development of the railways, even though the industry had its fair share of crooks and incompetents. And for that matter, even the tulip bubble, as the Wikipedia entry I linked to suggests, did perhaps help to drive development of what is still a huge horticultural industry in the Low Countries.
The trouble with bubbles is that they pop. But it is too easy to forget, in our current fit of puritan disgust for speculative frenzy, that much, if not all of the energy that can drive prices for things higher is reflective of often dynamic and highly beneficial changes in the long run. I still believe that in a few years’ time, unless we have reverted to statism completely, that the long boom of the 1990s and most of the ‘Noughties will be seen as a generally good thing, even though part of it was driven by unwisely cheap money set by central banks – state institutions – rather than genuine economic rationale.
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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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