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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Mickey Kaus breaks it down:
When Kuttner says “Japanese total labor costs are comparable, even with Detroit’s higher health insurance costs,” he is–as is so often the case–talking through his hat. Look at this chart. GM pays $31.35 an hour. Toyota pays $27 an hour. Not such a big difference. But–thanks in part to union work rules that prevent the thousands of little changes that boost productivity–it takes GM, on average, 34.3 hours to build a car, while it takes Toyota only 27.9 hours. ** Multiply those two numbers together and it comes out that GM spends 43% more on labor per car. And that’s before health care costs (where GM has a $1,300/vehicle disadvantage.
Of course, nothing convinces like an apples-to-apples comparison. And on that front, we find:
Is it really an accident that all the UAW-organized auto companies are in deep trouble while all the non-union Japanese “transplants” building cars in America are doing fine? Detroit’s designs are inferior for a reason, even when they’re well built. And that reason probably as more to do with the impediments to productivity imposed by the UAW–or, rather, by legalistic, Wagner-Act unionism–than with slick and unhip Detroit corporate “culture.”
(emphasis supplied)
In theory, I got no problem with unions – they could be nothing more than a free association engaged in bargaining with willing buyer for their services. The problem is, there are no unions that represent this ideal. Unions in the US are an artificial creation of the state, a relic of an earlier day when socialism was The Answer to society’s problems, and unions were seen and used as a vehicle for rolling back, reforming, and ultimately displacing free market capitalism.
It is no accident that, in the US at least, unions have been steadily losing ground for decades in industries that actually have to compete to survive. The only areas where unions are strong at all is in the government sector and, sadly, in the quasi-government sectors (such as healthcare).
While there is zero chance of any reform of the state apparatus supporting unions (which is probably a shame; there may well be a legitimate and beneficial role for non-corrupt, non-state-supported unions in some sectors, but we will never know), but I for one am glad to know that they are in broad decline, and that globalized markets mean there is little to no chance they will ever stage a resurgence in their current form. The fate of unions seem to be a rare example of civil society grinding down the state.
Well, I have just spent a very agreeable and maybe even an informative hour, watching P. J. O’Rourke telling me about the history of California’s state governors, on BBC4 television. Hyram Johnson, Brown, Reagan, Brown Junior, Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger – they have been a quite interesting lot, whatever you think of them. I say maybe informative, because you never really know how much of the story is really sinking in when you watch television. But, it felt informative. I certainly never felt as if my intelligence was being insulted.
O’Rourke neither concealed nor overdid his own conservative/libertarian leanings. He was the Republican Party Reptile of old, but now, he said, in connection with how Ronald Reagan ran political rings around the hippies (underestimating Reagan’s political savvy and seriousness was a habit that started early – that was made very clear), that he now entirely understands anti-youth policies. The story O’Rourke told was not so much of big versus small government, but of oscillations between somewhat simplistic outsider promises to clean things up, and a safe but grubby pair of hands to sort out the resulting confusions, followed by more promises to clean up the grubbiness, and so on indefinitely.
Two things have somewhat distressed me about O’Rourke’s career in recent years. First, despite several attempts over the years, he has never made much of an impact on British TV, unless you count his recent British Airways adverts. → Continue reading: P. J. O’Rourke does British television – very well
President Bush faces two tests on Social Security (the US government pension scheme).
The first test is whether he agrees to the deal US government officials have made with Mexico. This deal would allow Mexican illegal immigrants to the United States to collect Social Security benefits whilst having only paid 18 months worth of Social Security tax to the United States government – as long as they had paid at least eight years two months worth of Mexican payroll tax to the Mexican government (the Mexican government would keep this money, not hand it over). As this is an ‘equal’ deal should any American sneak into Mexico and pay Mexican payroll tax for 18 months, having paid Social Security tax to the United States government for at least 18 months, they will get a Mexican government pension, unlike Mexican citizens who have to pay far longer to get anything like a full pension – even a full pension paid at the Mexican rate.
Libertarians might object to illegal immigrants being deported as Eisenhower did in the un-PC named ‘Operation Wetback’ in the 1950’s, but paying them a government pension seems a bit odd to start with. Even ten years of ‘contributions’ is not sustainable… a illegal immigrant with documents claiming he is 55 years of age comes illegally into the United States, pays the payroll tax for ten years and then gets a government pension till he dies. Indeed government pensions are part of the reason that free migration just does not work in a Welfare State, and make no mistake, that is what the United States has evolved into.
If a poor person can enter the country and say “I have children, pay for their education”, “I am sick give me health care – Medicaid or emergency State and local medical care” and, after a while, “I am old, give me a pension and …” then tens of millions of come and indeed about 12 million already have come illegally, and the system will collapse a lot quicker than it would otherwise. → Continue reading: Social Security: two tests for President Bush
A few days ago, Perry de Havilland suggested the rather cute idea of erecting statues of the US Senators who cooked up the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law, on the grounds that this law has encouraged many firms into listing their businesses outside the United States and holding Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) outside Jefferson’s Republic. London’s stock market has benefited from this, as have bourses such as the Amsterdam Euronext, for instance. I do not know whether some of the impact of S-O has been exaggerated – this may be the case – but there is no doubt that from a regulatory point of view, the United States is not quite the model of laissez-faire capitalism that its supporters or indeed opponents imagine it to be. In fact, the US has been becoming a regulatory hell-hole for some time, such as with the recent crackdown on online gambling, to take one example.
Another man who deserves some sort of award for unintentionally driving business away from America is departing NY Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer. He is stepping down from the job to run for political office, and some say he has been doing that while in his present role. While some of his highly public campaigns to crack down on dodgy dealings should be applauded by free marketeers on the grounds that markets need laws against fraud, some of his campaigns seem to be driven more by the wrong-headed belief that markets must in some sense be “fair” and “perfect” in order to work in the interests of the general public. The mistaken idea that markets must contain no barriers to entry, contain “perfect” information and so on, has done incalculable harm to real capitalism, as also seen in the absurdities often perpetrated in the name of “trust-busting”. In his campaign against biased stock market research, for instance, Spitzer seems to downplay the old wise dictum, “let the buyer beware”, and presume to protect the customer against the shock-horror fact that banks might not be models of Olympian objectivity. There is a good and passionate attack on Spitzer’s record here.
Spitzer did some good but also a lot of harm to Wall Street and beyond. Competing financial centres, possibly including the rapidly-growing hub of Dubai, will rush in to fill the gap as capital becomes ever more fluid in this information age (yes, you read me correctly, I said Dubai, notwithstanding the local regional, er, difficulties).
In case any US readers get all hot under the collar about yours truly, a Brit, taking a prod at the US economy, I am only too well aware of how Britain is falling under the same regulatory menace, both of the home-grown and EU varieties. We all lose if the world’s biggest free economy becomes encumbered by bad laws.
The last American President (indeed, I believe, the last American politician) to really remember what the United States was like before the Hoover-Roosevelt Depression and the New Deal died on December 26th..
From now on every one talks or writes of the time when, for example, American farmers got their income from their customers, rather than the government, will be drawing on second hand information from books and so on rather than their own memories.
The same is true for when people talk of the time when men either did not expect to ‘retire’ (i.e. stop working because they had reached a certain age) or looked to their families and to private investments and fraternities (in the 1920’s ‘fraternity’ did not mean ‘student society’ for most people – it meant a group of adult people in a social and mutual aid society) to finance their retirement.
Was it a better time? Well technology was much more primitive and the capital base much less developed – so living standards were a lot lower. At least the statistics tell me so, although whenever I see film of the time (even socialist propaganda films) the people of the 1920’s look better dressed and more clean cut (or just more clean) than people today. And I do not think that the fact that most people were a lot slimmer was due to them not having enough money to eat themselves fat.
However, I am thinking of what is sometimes (after the actor) called the ‘Harold Lloyd’ America of scientific, economic and social progress (the America that Ford’s Grand Rapids Michigan was very much a part of in the 1920’s). Not the ‘Jim Crow’ (compulsory discrimination against blacks) South where corruption and poverty were much bigger factors.
On race: It was legal to discriminate against blacks in Michigan in the 1920’s (although, as stated above, it was not compulsory), but one of things about being a libertarian that shocks people is that we do not hold that someone should be prevented from discriminating by law. Who one chooses to trade with should be just that – a choice. If a bigot chooses not to take the money from black people (for example by not allowing them to rent rooms in his hotel), or chooses to employ a white idiot over an intelligent black person – that is their loss.
As for the general question of “race relations”. Did people of different races really tend to hate each other more in 1920’s Michigan (and the North generally) than they do now? Or did they just lie less? Judging things Henry Ford’s anti-semitic Dearborn Independent will not do. Henry Ford really did believe that ‘the Jews’ had sabotaged his efforts to make peace in Europe during World War I, but Henry Ford did not speak for all of Michigan, let alone all of the North. Michigan was and is also the State of Hillsdale University , the first college in the nation to let in blacks in on equals terms way back in the 1850’s and a strong supporter of equal treatment of people from all ethnic groups and of women. They were also a stern opponent of government statutes to force people act in ways favourable to blacks or to women or to anyone). With the death of Gerald Ford there is virtually no one left who knows what ordinary people really felt in their hearts in the 1920’s.
As for Prohibition: now there is the ‘War on Drugs’ which produces even more crime and corruption. At least there was a Constitutional basis for Prohibition (the 18th Amendment).
On politics: I confess I do not even know how Gerald Ford voted in 1936 (even if voted at all). I know he worked in the Republican campaign in 1940, but that might have been a protest against FDR going for a third term (which even George Washington had rejected) rather than out of a desire to fight the New Deal.
Certainly Gerald Ford (then an ‘America First’ type person as most Republicans from the midwest were) was against the underhand way that President Roosevelt was trying to get the United States into World War II (and contrary to the myth being against war in 1940 did not mean being ‘pro Nazi’ most, although not all, people who were against war in the United States despised Hitler and the National Socialists), and FDR was certainly violating the law – for example by sending aid to Britain, occupying Iceland, and ordering American forces to destroy German naval forces and dishonestly claiming that the Germans fired first.
On Japan, President Roosevelt’s policy of seizing Japanese assets and cutting off supplies of raw materials to Japan successfully led to war. But the Japanese did not have to be so stupid as to lauch the suicidal war on the United States in 1941 (they should either have just accepted their losses – or helped the Germans against the Soviet Union) and nor did they have to wage the war in the way they did (for example the vile treatment of allied prisoners of war did not benefit Japan in any great way).
Nor did the Germans have to declare war on the United States after the 1941 attack by Japan any more than the Japanese had declared war on the Soviet Union after the German attack on it in June – indeed the failure of Japan to help allowed the Soviets to move vast forces from Siberia to the defence of Moscow.
Whatever the details the actions of both Japan and Germany and the threat of international communism led Gerald Ford to reject the view that America could stay out of the wars of the world – and he became an ‘internationalist’, running against the ‘isolationist’ Republican Congressman in Grand Rapids and supporting Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower faction of the Republican party who wished to keep American power actively involved overseas.
How does this fit with wanting to keep government limited at home?
Certainly it is possible to support an ‘active’ foreign policy and limited government at the same time as a lot of people have – going right back to Pitt the Elder in Britain, but there is a tension in allowing government to spend a lot and do a lot in terms of defence and foreign policy and trying to keep it otherwise limited – however much writers such William Buckley Jr tried to paper over the cracks.
Oddly enough, I think that Gerald Ford went full circle (or something close to it) in foreign policy. As President he still tried to prevent the betrayal of Laos, Cambodia and the Republic of Vietnam, when Congress cut off support and allowed the Communists to take over in contempt for the peace agreements they had signed, murdering millions of people and enslaving tens of millions more.
However, President Ford’s heart never seemed to be it. He said clearly that Congress was breaking the promises that America had made – but he never made a great campaign of it. It was not that Ford was a pacifist as when the Cambodian Communists captured an American ship, his response was swift and hard, it was that in his heart he did not really believe in great President Wilson style wars for the alleged benefit of foreigners. If the foreigners were too unwilling or too corrupt to defend themselves after almost 60,000 Americans had died for them, perhaps it was time to say “enough is enough” and leave them to their fate (although President Ford did make sure that hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Indochina were allowed into the United States – and they have proved to be good citizens). → Continue reading: President Gerald Ford…and the end of an era
Glenn Reynolds also links to an item on John Kerry’s trip to visit the troops in Iraq. It seems his presence has not been well received. I particularly like the photo of him breakfasting alone whilst the troops chatter away at other tables.
Just could not happen to a nicer guy, eh wot?
I was recently asked why people believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ saved the United States from the Great Depression.
The answer is that people are told so – by television and radio shows, films, and (of course) at school. A more difficult question would be why do some people not believe this, indeed why are some people anti-statist generally, in spite of the ‘education system’ and the mainstream media.
Perhaps the leftists (using the modern definition of ‘left’ – I know that Bastiat sat on the left hand side of the French Assembly and so on) have some variation of their ‘authoritarian personality’ fraud (the theory that purported to explain away conservative opinions as a personality disorder). to explain away libertarian opinions. Or perhaps there is some genetic characteristic (although leftists prefer environmental explanations) that could be claimed to ‘explain’ why libertarians believe the things we do.
Of course the above ‘explanations’ (as with older Marxist doctrines of ‘class interest’ and ‘ruling class ideology’) are efforts to avoid having to deal with the facts and arguments presented by non-leftists.
As for the ‘New Deal’ itself, some background is in order… → Continue reading: President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’
Two senior American politicians, one a Republican, one a Democrat, have sent a snotty letter to ExxonMobil in order to tell that firm that it should cease funding views that challenge the Green consensus. The effrontery of these twerps really takes the breath away. It further bolsters my view that many environmentalists, at least on the edges, are hostile to free speech and liberty more generally. If were a senior manager at this oil firm, I would reply by informing these characters over exactly what they can do with such letters. There is no longer any point pretending to be nice to these people.
The Wall Street Journal has a strong editorial here on the subject. Thanks to Reason’s Hit and Run blog for the pointer.
I do not know whether the Democrats will win the office of President in 2008 or not.
Walmart bashing, promises of worse barriers to trade (the free trade deals with Colombia, Ecuador and Peru seem to be the latest targets of the Democrats [the various Marxist terrorist groups in Latin America will be pleased] – with demands that these countries further cripple themselves with more “union rights” and other regulations) and even bigger subsidies for universities (which will push up costs again) and even more regulations on HMOs and insurance companies (which will also push up costs again), even more money tossed away on “No-Child-Left-Behind” (and other unconstitutional welfare state schemes) than the Republicans tossed away on them and…
I doubt that this agenda will still be popular after another two years of Nancy Pelosi and the rest pushing it. Indeed I do not think it is that popular now – I think the Republicans lost the midterms partly because of sleaze and Pork, but mostly because of “the war stupid”.
And by 2008 the great George Bush – Mark Steyn project to spread democracy to the Muslims will either be abandoned (and voters will forget it fairly fast once they stop seeing American soldiers dying on the television news) or there will be some evidence that it is actually a good idea – either way it is not going to shape the 2008 elections in the way it shaped the 2006 elections.
However, the Democrats may win. The power of the mainstream (i.e. leftist) media is vast (and the left are just as good as anyone else in using the internet – perhaps better than their foes) and the Democrats have huge amounts of money that are not hit by John McCain’s death-to-the-First-Amendment ‘campaign finance reform’. → Continue reading: 2012 – The great chance for liberty in the United States?
It looks like Congressman Rangel is at it again.
I guess he just thinks enslaving your fellow man is a great idea.
Our thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.
Not good. Michael Barone explains:
Almost all incumbent House Democrats voted against a free-trade measure as innocuous as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Protectionism has become a partisan issue, with virtually all Democrats for and most Republicans against. So you can score a Democratic victory, like this year’s, as a victory for protectionism. It will certainly have consequences. Trade promotion authority lapses on June 30 next year, and the chances that the Democratic Congress will renew it are close to zero. The Doha round of world trade talks is currently stalled and unlikely to be renewed in time for an agreement to be sent to Congress. In any case, the fact that the Agriculture committees will be chaired by Tom Harkin from corn-growing Iowa and Collin Peterson from the wheat-growing Minnesota Seventh District means that the 2007 farm bill will not meet the standards of any Doha agreement that could conceivably be reached. The lapsing of trade promotion authority will doom the regional and two-country trade agreements that special trade representatives Robert Zoellick, Rob Portman, and Susan Schwab have been negotiating. We won’t be moving toward more protectionism, probably. But we’re going to miss many chances to advance free trade.
The idea that any country has universal jurisdiction over citizens of other countries, and can try them for actions taking place in yet a third country, would be risible if it were not deeply offensive.
One would think the Germans, of all people, would exhibit a tad more humility in these matters, but if the assertion of universal jurisdiction is not symptomotic of a colossal arrogance, I do not know what is. You would have thought we kicked this nonsense out of the Germans during the ’40s, but I guess not.
It also makes the concept of ‘representative government’ rather irrelevant – after all, the Americans who are apparently now subject to German law never voted in any German election.
It does place our new Democratic overlords in rather an awkward spot; they loathe Rumsfeld, but I suspect that even they are reluctant to bundle him off to Germany for judgement by lefty Euros and miscellaneous anti-American yahoos. After all, if a Republican official is subject to German judgement, why, so might be a Democratic official, should the Rodham-Clinton administration find it necessary to stand up to the jihadis in ways that the neo-dhimmis of Eurabia find offensive.
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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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