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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I hardly know whether to laugh, or cry, at this one.
First, the tears:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 “baby bond” from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.
A more grotesque pander is hard to imagine. Naturally, the more rational among us are puzzled:
How might this be funded? There are only three groups that could be asked to pay for the new entitlement with higher taxes (or lower benefits): the current elderly, those currently of working age, or the same future generations who are getting the new benefit and are slated to pay for existing unfunded entitlements. Which group do you think Senator Clinton has in mind?:
As with all arbitrary handouts, it also raises the question (and you can be sure it will be asked if this goes anywhere) of “why not more”? If $5,000 of free money is good thing, why isn’t $10,000 twice as good?
Now, the laughter:
Sixty percent (60%) of America’s Likely Voters oppose giving every child born in the United States a $5,000 savings bond, or “baby bond.” A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 27% support the concept suggested on Friday by Senator Hillary Clinton.
Unlike socialized medicine, which I believe is a genuine Cause to the otherwise calculating Hillary, the baby bond is most likely just a trial balloon, thrown out there to see if it would strike any sparks. Having drawn derision and virtually no support from anyone who wouldn’t vote for her anyway, I suspect we have seen the last of it. Still, it is a little chilling to contemplate the leading contender for President of the United States already toying with naked wealth transfers such as this.
There is a strange situation in Louisiana in which absurdly mis-labled ‘civil rights’ protests have been occurring. This has happened because six black students were arrested for seriously assaulting a white student in the aftermath of some nooses being hung suggestively from a tree in order to intimidate black students.
Now correct me if I am wrong but whilst hanging nooses from a tree is a very offensive reference to lynching, unless the owner of the tree objects or someone’s neck is in one of the nooses, dangling some rope from a tree is an act of constitutionally protected freedom of expression, is it not? It may be offensive (like, for example, a rap song extolling the murder of policemen) but it is not actually illegal. Beating a seventeen year old unconscious on the other hand is not constitutionally protected freedom of expression, it is at the very least assault and was initially being treated as attempted murder.
So…
It seems that the ‘civil rights’ protesters feel that if members of the local black community have their sensibilities (quite rightly) upset by the admittedly vile way some teenagers have expressed themselves (namely hanging nooses from a tree), then they should be given the right to assault people they are offended by without charge or indeed any restraint of law.
Presumably these same protesters would also argue that the editors of Jyllands-Posten should be the legitimate targets for violence by any Muslim offended by their provocative use of their right to freedom of expression. Certainly that is what many Muslims were saying about the publishers of the ‘Mohammed cartoons’. The protesters in Louisiana logically must agree with that notion as from what I have read they are not arguing just for broad social opprobrium for the noose-hangers (that is already the case), they are calling for legal sanction against them (just as there were demands for the editors of Jyllands-Posten to be ‘punished’) and some are contributing to the defence costs of the people who beat up the white boy, which presumably means they do not want the black youths who did it punished because being offended makes violence by six (black) teenagers against one (white) teenager perfectly okay.
Is that indeed a fair assessment of what the ‘protesters’ think should be the case, or am I missing something here?
The administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand. With all due respect, I don’t buy it.
– Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, accusing General David Petraeus political motivations when delivering his report on military progress in Iraq. And of course a seeker-of-truth like Tom Landos’ utterances on the military situation could not possibly be motived by political considerations, right?
This essay, which I found while browsing the excellent website of Stephen Hicks, will resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a farmer’s son, I sympathise with its message, but more optimistically, I’d argue that in some ways, life in the countryside is still a lot less regulated than in the towns, perhaps rightly, since when people live in close proximity and have to get along, more rules are required, if only tacit, rather than written, rules. But the sort of restrictions this farmer writes about are not caused by that sort of issue, but by the ongoing move by the state to regulate agriculture.
Cynics may argue that farmers have signed a Faustian pact with the state; they have accepted massive subsidies and can hardly be surprised if the providers of said increasingly demand to control the actions of the recipients. I agree with this. The sooner that the Common Agricultural Policy and its equivalents are obliterated, the better.
I have no problem with unions existing; freedom of association is an important right and one that should never be taken away from us. The problem I have is with unions always seeming to be on the wrong side of every damn issue. And so it goes with patent reform. Way not to break precedent, guys.
Well, the Fed has cut the cost of borrowing to avert what many see as a financial crisis. There are several ways to view this move, I guess. One view, as expressed here, is that central banks created the current asset price bubble and appetite for dubious credit products like collateralised debt obligations – bundles of bonds and loans – by cheap interest rates. Central banks caused this state of affairs, so they should let hedge funds and other institutions go bankrupt as part of the natural, if painful Darwinian process of the market. It sounds harsh, but a few casualties, while not much fun for the immediate investors, are a useful warning about how investments can go awry.
On the other hand, the fall in stock market prices since late July has been so fast that it threatens to cause a wider, systemic economic problem, and the rate cut was justified.
I take the former view, by and large. The underlying state of the UK economy, for example, is reasonable, if not great (thanks to the taxes and regulations of our current prime minister, Gordon Brown). But corporate earnings have been strong, consumer spending is okay – it has weakened a bit but hardly fallen off a cliff – and the cost of equities, when set against expected corporate earnings, are pretty cheap by long term standards. (The FTSE 100 index is priced on a multiple of about 12 times earnings, the cheapest since the early 1990s). The Fed, by cutting rates in this way, is more or less saying that stock market bears cannot make money, that the only way to bet is for stocks to rise. This ultimately creates a serious moral hazard by encouraging risky borrowing and lending behaviour.
I think we’ll regret what the Fed did today. Whoever said August was dull?
Leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.
Seriously, can we get this promise in writing?
Then again, I am pretty familiar with what politicians consider “leaving [us] alone”. It is akin to saying, “Well, I am still going to bugger you senseless, and I am still going to do it without your consent, but from now on I will not force you to grab your ankles and beg for more.”
Many intelligent things were said at the Republican debate broadcast by the American Broadcasting System the other week. But, being of a negative cast of mind, I was more interested in the stupid things that were said.
Ron Paul listed “Korea” as one of the wars that American should not have fought and “lost” (well there goes the Korean American vote).
Mitt Romney said that government should back “universal healthcare”, as he had introduced in Massachusetts, because otherwise “people turn up to Emergency Rooms and this is expensive” – of course people are still turning up to Emergency Rooms and demanding free treatment in Massachusetts – in spite of Mitt Romney’s expensive new government scheme (which will get more and more expensive over time).
However, I believe that the most stupid thing said at the debate was from Mike Huckabee (a big tax increaser from Arkansas) who said that health care would be fixed if “everyone in America had the same healthcare as the members of Congress were given”.
There are 100 members of the United States Senate, and there are 435 members of the House of Representatives. And there are about 300 million Americans.
Paying the health costs costs of 535 politicians is a rather smaller burden than paying the health care costs of 300, 000,000 people.
Yet this piece of populist bullshit (for that is what it was) was cheered and applauded.
There is a strange furore brewing over pharmaceuticals giant Johnson & Johnson suing the American Red Cross over their use of… the Red Cross… on certain commercial products.
My first reaction was “What the…? Have J&J gone completely nuts?”
But then I actually read the background to the story from someone who works at J&J, and also got some background from someone I know who works with them, whereupon I realised actually it is the American Red Cross who have gone nuts. In fact they are worse than nuts, they are acting both unreasonably and quite dishonourably.
Clearly J&J must be aghast by the PR mess that taking legal action against a venerable institution like the Red Cross is going to stir up… and the Red Cross knows that. And so it is very clear to me that when you read the Red Cross press release, what is going on here is a cynical bit of capitalist bashing so that the Red Cross can use their sainted reputation to tear up an agreement they reached over the appropriate use of that Red Cross symbol in… 1895.
Now you might think that how can J&J claim to own the rights to the Red Cross symbol in the USA? Sure, that seems weird, but the fact is the American Red Cross did agree that J&J did indeed own it all the way back in 1895, so that is an indisputable fact, and in return for J&J’s forbearance for the Red Cross using that symbol (not to mention a century of monetary and product donations… but then as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished), the Red Cross undertook not to use the symbol as a logo on products in the USA that directly compete with J&J products that also use that symbol. And so it was for one hundred years.
Until one day the Red Cross decide it no longer suits them, no doubt on the advise of some overpaid shister. It is a shameful think that an institution that people take to represent charity and honour can quite literally trade on that perception in order to act dishonourably. Sometimes big companies act appallingly, but sometimes they are just big targets for other who act dishonourably. J&J have no choice but to defend their trademark but the only winner in all of this will be a bunch of crapulous American lawyers. Such stupidity.
Update: some more background here.
When people start blaming Big Evil Capitalists for the latest SNAFU in the global capital markets – the collapse of many debt products linked to what are called sub-prime mortgages in the US – remember that the problem stems in part from how lenders have been positively encouraged by some states to lend money to risky borrowers and people with a history of debt defaults and late payments (thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link).
Of course, ultra-low interest rates in many nations, such as Japan, have also fuelled a vast rise in the levels of global monetary growth, which in the near-term encouraged people to invest in any asset class offering a decent return regardless of risk of assets held, like bundles of sub-prime mortgages repackaged into exotica called collateralised debt obligations (please do not ask me to define these, it is too early in the morning and I have only had one coffee). Low interest rates have cut the price that investors typically demand for shouldering risk; now that rates have risen to curb inflation, the price for that risk has gone up.
Milton Friedman and Robert Heinlein may be dead, but the truths they espoused are very much alive. As they said, there is not, and never has been, such thing as a free lunch.
Fresh from his humbling at the hands of Hillary Clinton and following on from a statement indicating his willingness to invade Pakistan, Barack Obama ladles on credence to the increasingly ubiquitous assertion that he’s inexperienced:
I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance…involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.
Desperately wrong answer to (what should be) a deal-breaking question, Mr Obama. Sure, waving the threat of one’s nuclear weapons capacity around like a pair of chopsticks in a cheap Chinese restaurant is not sensible, because it ultimately reduces that capacity’s deterrent value – which is the only practical reason why a sane nation would field a nuclear arsenal in this world of other nations who also possess The Bomb. A wise leader does not even refer to his country’s nuclear weapons capacity, because the widespread knowledge of that capacity speaks for itself more effectively than any politician could ever hope to.
Conversely, it is sheer lunacy for a US President (or hopeful) to declare that he will never press the button, because such statements completely undermine the deterrent value of these weapons. Mr Obama, if you are not running on a platform of nuclear disarmament, you never take the nuclear option off the table. Ever. You made a most elementary strategic blunder – you are not a suitable candidate for the role of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.
Andrew Sullivan is a rum character. Columnists are not supposed to maintain an iron consistency in their views and I do not hold it against Sullivan that he has switched from being a rather embarrassingly full-on cheerleader for George W. Bush, for example, to an equally full-on despiser of said. I actually believe Sullivan when he claims that his anger at some of Bush’s policies is not primarily motivated by Bush’s stance on gay marriage, but more by Bush’s very un-conservative heavy public spending, abuse of certain powers, and above all, the bungling in Iraq. But Sullivan likes to act as a sort of arbiter of what a true “conservative” is, but I wonder about his credentials on this score. This post leaves a nasty taste, even though Sullivan does his utmost, quite rightly, to divorce himself from condoning acts of violence:
Enviro-activists go all terrorist on us. The Washington Post story is here. I have to say that while I completely abhor the violence, I do not abhor the sentiment. Parking a 7-foot high Hummer in your neighborhood is about as irritating as watching one careen down the small streets of Provincetown. We have to create a social stigma toward people totally contemptuous of the environment.
“We have to create a social stigma”. That is really nice, Andrew. Several decades ago, certain people thought that it was right to “create a social stigma”, involving lots of nasty expressions and social ostracism, against people who wanted to have sex with people of their own gender. People once thought about sexual morality in much the same way that some people think about those who delight in driving gas guzzling cars. I do not know: maybe driving a large car is morally worse than two men bonking one another, but many people might take a different view. Sullivan is a man who has benefited from the liberties afforded to him by the United States, and has written eloquently about the plight of gay people and their struggle to be accepted as normal. It is particularly disappointing to see him joining what amounts to the moral bullying tactics of the Greens and their hysterical invocations of global doom.
Perhaps Dubya has unhinged the man. I wish Sullivan would cheer up: he used to be a great writer. Perhaps he should come back home to Britain for a few years and rediscover his English sense of humour.
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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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