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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A half-remembered phrase from a short story by C S Forester is lodged in my mind. The story is set in World War II. Some sort of British warship has to approach very near an enemy-occupied coast, do something or other heroic, and then get away before the German artillery can do its work. The ship, under the guidance of its iron-nerved captain, does so, and then – futzed if I can remember the details – stops or delays to do something else, to serve some side order of military misery to go with the main dish, the captain having calculated that it will take a certain amount of time for the defenders to wake up, realise this is for real, get orders and crank up the guns or whatever. Everyone else on the bridge makes their estimate of how long all this will take erring on the side that one does generally err on when the penalty for error on the other side is to be shot at by artillery, but the captain makes his estimate the way he would from his armchair at home. His bold guess is right, and the ship gets away. And then comes the phrase that shows clear among the fog of my other memories of this story: those watching on the bridge were awed by his sheer will to do the enemy harm.
I dare say in WWII there were many people, ordinary people, who really did spend a substantial fraction of their time thinking up ways to hurt the Axis. No doubt most of them ended up bombarding the War Office with absurd plans and inventions that came to nothing, but some of them found ways that worked. It must be rather interesting to live in a time and a place where it is good to let the will to harm the enemy run free.
We in Greater Europe do live in such a time and place. Don’t get excited. I am not advocating violence. In fact I get a little disturbed when Tim Worstall, the blogger whom I am about to quote, makes his customary appeal for a hempen rope and a strong beam. But when I read on his blog about this latest measure from the EU, all I could think was harm them. Bring them down. Please, I would be grateful.
I generally like the columns of William Rees-Mogg on economics; while he is no hardline free marketeer like the scribes here, he has a sharper nose for the errors of interventionism than many MSM writers. He also has a knack – which comes from a man who is of great age – for putting current events into a proper historical context. But he makes this statement in his generally admiring writeup on Roosevelt that is surely downright wrong. Not just a teeny-weenie bit wrong, but disastrously so for this whole argument:
In March 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, he had to face the Slump. Unemployment was by then running at about 30 per cent. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, based on an extensive programme of raising employment through public works. Unemployment did actually fall to about 5 per cent by the time of Roosevelt’s second election victory in 1936. There continued to be stumbles along the way, particularly in 1937.
Well according to official US statistics referred to here, unemployment certainly did not fall anything like as low as that during FDR’s 1930s period in the White House, and then only dropped significantly once the Second World War started.
I do not know where Rees-Mogg got his figures from or what sort of statistical resource he is using, but this is not a minor discrepancy. To suggest that unemployment fell as low as 5 per cent in the mid-1930s seems to fly totally in the face of the official data.
This book reviewer says the 1930s were, on the whole, a pretty good time to be British. It is a point of view one does not come across very much, that is for sure. The stock image of the 1930s is the era that saw the rise of the Nazis, the Great Famine in the USSR, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, the Royal Abdication Crisis, etc. But was there more to it than that, at least at home? The book says that British society was in some ways in pretty good shape.
In military terms, at least by the end of the 1930s Britain had evolved what ultimately proved to be a very well organised air defence system, with radar and nifty fighters like the Spitfire. The 1930s was stylistically elegant: the cars of that era looked absolutely glorious.
On the other hand, I would argue that the 1930s was a period in which limited government continued to be under siege and apostles of planning and greater government regulation were gathering momentum, to reach fruition – if that is quite the right word – in 1945 with the election of the Attlee Labour government.
Discuss.
Is this what it must have felt like in the 1930’s?
A few months back – I don’t recall exactly when – I voiced my irritation here at the notion, regularly voiced by members of our commentariat until I said to put a sock in it, of leaving Britain to go and live somewhere else, usually the USA. I now officially withdraw this irritation. The sooner large numbers of Brits start voting with their feet, the sooner some kind of sanity may be restored to our public finances. Voice isn’t working very well just now, but there still remains exit, and the sound of people exiting is actually one of the loudest political voices there is.
Remember which way the Berlin Wall pointed? Idiot Western apologists for Bolshevism talked their way around everything else about the Evil Empire, but that they couldn’t explain. Remember when the success of Hong Kong as an alleviator of dirt-poor poverty and as a facilitator of the wildest of wild dreams was likewise denounced by the same idiots as a cruel and exploitative fantasy? Again, the statistics of who was then swimming, through what and in which direction, were the most telling of the lot, long before the economic numbers coming out of Hong Kong began to prove all those daredevil swimmers so magnificently right.
And here, now, nothing would concentrate the minds of our political class on doing the right things rather than stupid things like a mass stampede for the exit. If you are thinking now of leaving, do it. This would not only be selfishly sensible; it would be downright patriotic, just like regular voting for something sensible, only more so. In the event that any of our masters actually want to rescue our country from its present mess, nothing would be more useful to such persons than the pitter patter of adult feet, leaving for less insanely governed places. I still have hopes that Mr Cameron is now taking deep breaths and preparing himself to lunge for just this sort of glory. Call it the audacity of hope.
So, as the Americans say: way to go! But: where to go? Which countries are now the best bet for that alternative lifestyle, where you get to work, pay only moderate levels of tax, and are able rationally to hope that your grandchildren might do better than you instead of worse? The USA? Not now the obvious choice it might once have been, and in any case, how – legally – do you get in?
My suggestion is: Ireland. As the great Guido explained yesterday:
Ireland, which is taking the austerity route out of the crisis, slashing government spending, is attracting an entirely private sector solution to recapitalising banks. Property prices are becoming reasonable, tax rates are lower and big British run businesses are relocating to Ireland.
Ireland will probably be out of recession long before an economy crippled by Brown starts to recover – whomever wins the next election.
Apart from that peculiar “whomever”, that strikes me as likely to be very right, and a very good bet for a good place to go to. And as Guido makes clear, the pitter-pattering has already begun. And, look, Guido now has an update to that posting:
UPDATE: Ireland’s new finance bill is changing the law to entice non-doms to move from London to Ireland,
And I bet it’s not just non-doms. I bet that us doms are already joining in.
Pitter patter.
Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend
Leo McKinstry
John Murray, 2007 (first published in paperback 2008), 435pp., £8.99 in paperback
On the strength of Leo McKinstry’s excellent book about Geoff Boycott, I bought this book about the Supermarine Spitfire. I didn’t find it quite so entertaining as that first one, but I kept reading, and I kept learning things that I didn’t know about this famous airplane.
The basic problem with the Spitfire story, as a story, is that almost all of the excitement comes at the beginning. How was it designed and by whom? Once designed, will it be ready in time for the world-shaping, civilisation-saving contest which all readers know will soon erupt? Well, we know that it will be ready, but how? In what numbers? Who were the insufficiently sung heroes of this story, and who the insufficiently damned villains? And, in the great battle, how exactly did it do? That’s the heart of the story, and McKinstry tells it well, or at least (to an airplane ignoramus like me) convincingly. But the Spitfire carried on being manufactured right through the war, all the while being speeded up, enlarged, having its shape made uglier, its armaments made fiercer, its range improved, its weight greatly increased, and its task list expanded. Had McKinstry ignored all this later stuff it might have made a more entertaining book, but that would not have been the story of the Spitfire. As it is, the Battle of Britain only ends more than half way through the book, after which McKinstry takes us on a tour of all the other dramas and developments as efficaciously as he can. → Continue reading: What the Spitfire did and what the Spitfire did next
It is funny how films that you put down on the “must get around to seeing it sometime” list never get seen. Well, I have wanted to watch that 1970 epic, Waterloo, for a while and watched it during a quiet Saturday afternoon. Several things struck me about it, not least the fact that the cast was drawn from the Soviet Union (the Red Army?). I think I remember reading somewhere that the Soviet forces were used as cast extras in quite a lot of films, including a Russian film version of War and Peace. Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Bonaparte has not, in my view, ever been bettered. What a great actor Steiger was. Mad eyes.
I wonder if anyone who drives past the rolling wheatfields of Belgium in which the battle was fought ever wonder about the sheer carnage that was caused on that damp June day in 1815, or reflect that, nearly 200 years later, Bonaparte’s dream of a pan-European empire has in some ways come to pass, albeit without the nifty French cavalry uniforms.
Andrew Roberts’ fine account of both Napoleon and his nemesis, Wellington, is certainly worth a read.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he brought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service….The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income.”
– A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, page 1. Quoted by Alvin Rabushka in “From Adam Smith to The Wealth of America, page 80. The latter is a particularly good book, written very much from the “supply-side” school of economics with a strong account of developments in UK 19th century politics, Hong Kong, and the Reagan presidency.
I have been reading this book, by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV. King Henry ascended the throne of England after successfully deposing Richard II, and his own reign seems to have consisted of one attempt after another to depose him. Yet Henry IV died in his bed of natural albeit very painful causes.
One of these failed rebellions against King Henry, at the beginning of the year 1400, involved a certain Sir Thomas Blount.
Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor’s death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount’s execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No, for I do not know where I should put it’, he replied.
I had no idea that the people who suffered these frightful deaths were able to say anything at this late stage in their ordeal. I guess the executioners were trying to be as nice as they could to Sir Thomas, against whom they presumably had no personal animus, rather like Michael Palin in this. But, talk about too little, too late.
Although of course it is a joke, see the posting immediately below. As Jonathan has already noted, Guido Fawkes has had a lot of fun over the last few months noting that every time Gordon Brown comes out in support of anything, it immediately tanks. Andy Murray was Mr Brown’s latest victim, apparently. So when I read on the Coffee House blog this morning that Gordon Brown now supports Barack Obama, I knew that Guido would be crowing with laughter, if not now then very soon, and sure enough, he is. Obama, says a delighted Guido, is now officially doomed. Luckily, before posting this, I also checked out Samizdata to see if anyone else here was having a laugh about this, and of course, they are.
Apologies if you think I am duplicating here, but behind the hilarity of all this is to be observed an interesting re-arrangement of the political conventions, which is why I still put this thought up as a separate posting. More and more mere people, especially political people, like the ones who read Samizdata for example, have their particular preferences not just in their own countries and constituencies and districts and states and towns, but in ‘foreign’ parts also. The logic of the internet – even of instant electronic communication itself, which got started getting on for two hundred years ago – has always, to me, suggested global political affiliations, and in due course, global political parties. Certainly the Communist movement thought so. Maybe language remains a big barrier, but geography now matters less and less.
Remember that counter-productive attempt by the Guardian to swing the last (was it?) Presidential election against Bush? Many concluded that this proved the wisdom of political people staying out of foreign elections. To me it merely proved that if you want to help this or that side in foreign parts, make sure that you really are helping. Because attempts to help like this are absolutely not going to stop. As the very existence of Samizdata now nicely illustrates, this is all now one big Anglospherical conversation.
Obama’s idiotic campaign trip to Germany was, you might say, a self-inflicted version of that same Guardian blunder. But nor does that folly prove, to me, that campaigners should never go abroad and seek foreign support when campaigning, merely that they should choose their foreign supporters with more care than Obama did. Having the right sort of foreigners waving and cheering next to him can do a politician all kinds of good, now that the pictures can be flashed around the world in seconds.
Under pressure from the McCain camp, the Brown regime is conducting another of its hasty and shambolic retreats. All sorts of stuff gets read out by Mr Brown, or appears under his name in printed articles. But you don’t suppose that he actually reads it all beforehand, do you? Mr Brown’s people are now assuring us that it was one of them who inadvertently revealed this sentiment, rather than Mr Brown himself who actually said it. All Mr Brown did was allow his name to be attached to the bottom of a newspaper article. So once again, there is this pattern, of the political leader trying, but failing, to observe the old and obsolete conventions, against his natural instincts, but his mere people not being so inhibited about saying what they think. Sooner or later the world’s leaders will all follow their mere supporters, and stop pretending to be neutral in foreign elections. Their line should be, because this will be the truth: of course I’ll work with whoever wins, I’m a politician. But meanwhile, yes, I do most definitely have my preferences.
The particular awfulness and embarrassingness of Mr Brown’s particular expression of a preference in the US Presidential election should not detract from the more general interestingness of this little event. Inevitably, most of the commentary will be about how the Obama campaign may now have peaked (the comments on Jonathan’s previous posting are already saying yes it has), and about how the Brown regime is unravelling, definitely, again, some more. But I find the more general global political party angle at least as interesting.
After all, this is not now only Brown preferring Obama, which we all know he does despite any denials (does anybody at all in what is left of the Labour Party not prefer Obama to McCain?). This is also now the McCain team opposing Brown, and not caring who knows it. And by extension, and whatever Mr McCain may personally feel or even know about the man, helping David Cameron. After all, the heading at Coffee House says: “The McCain campaign mocks Gordon Brown”. So now Mr McCain is doing it too, whatever denials he may subsequently issue.
The other night I dined with Michael Jennings, and the question arose between us about how the political atmosphere of Britain now compared with the atmosphere of Britain in slightly earlier times, the most obvious comparison being between now and the time just before – and at the start of – the Thatcher era. Whether Michael himself asked about how 1979 and thenabouts compared to now I cannot recall. Probably not, because in 1979 he was a young boy living in Australia. But I found myself trying to answer this question, because I believe that the comparison is rather intriguing.
Economically, Britain then and Britain now are in a rather similar mess, created by similar policies. The government was then, and is now, spending more than it can comfortably raise from us in taxes. Then as now, international conditions had reduced what the government could comfortably spend, but the government found it hard to react rationally. So much, briefly, for the similarities. But the differences are huge. These differences are in the party politics of it all. → Continue reading: 1979 and now – similar economics but different politics
The BBC is running a television series called The Tudors, I believe that the show is in its second series. They seem to think that the Tudor dynasty started with Henry VIII as there were no episodes on his father Henry VII, and the show still seems to be stuck on Henry VIII. Indeed his second wife, Ann Boleyn, has not even been executed yet – sorry if this is a ‘spoiler’ to people who think the fate of Ann is a cliff hanger.
“Sneer as much as you like about how slow paced this series is,” I hear you say, “the BBC is concentrating on telling the story correctly”.
Really?
Today I channel hopped and came upon the point in the show where the actor playing Thomas Cromwell was introducing a new invention – a secret weapon that would win the propaganda war with the Roman Catholics. The printing press (spoken with special stress) – introduced to the show with cries of “by God, what is that?”, and other such, from the actors.
Sadly the printing press was introduced to England during the reign of Edward IV – some sixty years before the time the scene was set, so everyone would have known exactly what a printing press was.
The excuse for the special tax that funds the BBC is that the organization ‘educates’ the population. This excuse just does not stand up.
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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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