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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Other people who know far more about military and security affairs than I do will judge what President Bush had to say about Iraq. I was more interested in what the President had to say about domestic policy.
There were some of the contradictions I have come to expect. For example, the words about local control of schools and the words in support of the No Child Left Behind Act (as if the Federal government can keep spending more money on schools without control of those schools ending up more-and-more in Federal hands). How such things as the no-child-left-behind Act are supposed to be consistent with the pledge to ‘balance the budget’ was also unexplained.
There was also the odd use of language. For example, although libertarians tend to favour ‘free migration’ it is irritating for the President to say ‘no amnesty’ for illegal immigrants when an amnesty is exactly what he is planning (although he may use some other form of words for it). Still, I suppose, this type of language use is not that odd among politicians.
On health care it was good to hear the return of President Reagan’s suggestion that income used by an individual to pay for health cover should not be subject to either income tax or social security (pay roll) tax. Linking tax relief to a particular job (via only employer provided health cover being covered) is silly. It was also interesting to see that the tax relief would be limited to a certain level of spending – so that in this (and other ways) people would have an incentive to shop around for health cover that controlled costs (the one good bit of the Medicare Part D. extension of some years ago).
There was nothing on how the existence of Medicare and Medicaid (which started out at five billion Dollars in 1965 and now cost hundreds of billions of Dollars) have had a knock on effect of increasing costs of private health cover – but I did not expect this (Medicare and Medicaid are sacred these days). → Continue reading: The worst part of the State of the Union Address
It is easier to grumble than to get off one’s backside and do something if a disaster hits and the supposed emergency systems of the state prove to be a joke, as was the case when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast over a year ago. In catching up on some reading, I came across this terrific and highly encouraging story of how assorted groups of volunteers, many of whom had a refreshingly dim view of officialdom, swung into action to help the people of New Orleans and others in the surrounding area. The article also reinforced my view of how the internet is helping fuel voluntarism in a way that feeds into the “Army of Davids” perspective of Glenn Reynolds recently.
The article contains this line:
“Here is a place where government failed absolutely, and as such it could be the perfect place to argue that government itself is a failure.”
I agree. I think the energy and neighbourliness of ordinary Americans as shown in this article are a welcome corrective to the cynicism many people may have felt when reading stories about looting or disorder in the aftermath of the disaster. (Some of these stories were questioned). I recall reading about the blackouts in New York a year or so ago and about how people banded together to ensure that folk got home safely. American civil society, precisely because of the still-strong ethos of voluntarism that so struck Alexis de Tocqueville 160 years ago, is in many ways in much better shape than here. I was particularly struck when I read the latest reports tonight of how looters scrambled to grab what they could from the cargo washed up on the English coast from the grounded container ship. I wonder how many ordinary people ever bothered to wonder how they could help protect the beach from pollution or ensure that no-one got hurt? Yes, I know that looting goes on after disasters around the world, but there seemed to be no countervailing examples over the past few days of people volunteering to help recover items for their rightful owners, for example. The idea of volunteers helping owners to sort out their property from the wreckage is just too bizarre for we Britons to contemplate.
Generalisations are always risky, but I get the feeling that if I was in a natural disaster, I would rather be in America than in Britain. It is a sad thing for a proud Briton like me to say, but I think that in this respect at least, the sort of neighbourliness and willingness to lend a hand has more or less died, although I may be a bit too gloomy here. To describe what might have killed that spirit would take me longer than a blog posting, so I will leave it to the commenters.
I am back and have been lurking for a bit. I did not intend to post for another week or two. In my initial post I said that occasionally something would cause me to “blow a gasket”: Habeas corpus is that something. Since King John at Runnymede was compelled to accept the Magna Carta, the right of an individual to demand access to judicial process has been the foundation stone of constitutional government.
Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts “declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty”
While I have been away, I have apparently missed some fun jesting about ‘meta-context’. This is a serious example of it.
In its simplest and most fundamental way, this is about tribalism. This is about who ‘we’ are. Who we see our selves as. Are we defined by our geographical boundaries? Is ‘American’ a tribal bond? Or are we the citizens of our constitution? Have we charged our government with protecting its own sovereignty and security by exchanging it for that of its citizens? Or have we charged it with protecting all citizens from violation of their personal sovereignty by all powers. Are we, the citizens, not the fundamental reason for our government? If it will not abide by its contract with us, is it truly still our government? At what point does it become an occupying power?
It is babies and bathwater. More than that, it is meta-context. Underpinning assumptions about collectivism vs individualism. Did you happen to notice that Attorney General Gonzales singled out individuals and citizens:
I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that.
→ Continue reading: A bolt between the eyes of constitutional government
Recently, Samizdata’s own Paul Marks had a post about F.D. Roosevelt and considered his reputation, his actions and the New Deal. The blogger under the name Hedge Fund Guy has this scathing assessment of the man regarded by many Britons to this day as a good guy:
I think FDR was a horrible president. My son takes better care of his ant farm than this guy took care of the economy. If ever there was someone in power who looked only at partial derivatives, it was FDR. If there was ever someone who focused on producers and ignored consumers, it was FDR. If there was anyone who thought self-interest was only present among businessmen, not government or union workers, it was FDR. His economic views are indistinguishable from a typical campus left-winger after 10 bong hits.
Ouch. He then goes on to attack much of FDR’s record, and I don’t have a quarrel with a single word of it. Even so, it interests me that a man who, objectively speaking, was a total failure in cutting the massive unemployment of 1930s America managed to hold the reputation as a saviour of capitalism for so long. I recall my O-Level history classes and how Roosevelt was presented as essentially one of the Good Men of History, while Herbert Hoover, FDR’s immediate predecessor in the White House, was presented as a Republican who did what he could but not nearly enough (in fact, Hoover was a persistent meddler and regulator, and carries considerable responsibility for the scale of the Great Depression, as do the protectionists in Congress at the time).
Roosevelt was a great showman. His “fireside chats”, his folksy manner, his ability to surround himself with a loyal and capable grouping of what we would call today “spin-doctors” ensured that the FDR myth lasted a long time. His friendship with Winston Churchill – albeit subject to strains and disagreements such as how to deal with Stalin – also ensured that the man is viewed by some Britons in a positive light. Being entirely selfish, I am glad that the United States entered the Second World War on Britain’s side, and one of the reasons why I am a visceral pro-American is that I believe that Europe today would be in a far worse shape than it is now were it not for the courage shown by America’s airmen, soldiers and sailors (some U.S. folk joined up on the British side even before America joined). I have absolutely no truck with the absurd isolationist view that the United States should have sat back, let Stalin/Hitler do their worst and if need be, come to some sort of accomodation with an entire European/Asian landmass under totalitarian, race-based thugs. So it is easy to see why Roosevelt’s image burned bright for many people.
I think the lesson of how FDR managed to hold a high reputation for so long is that a political leader, particularly if he or she is adept in the arts of propoganda and can come across as “doing something” to fix a problem, however counter-productive, can get a fair pass. I do wonder, however, whether FDR would have been as successful in narrow political terms now.
This book, written very much from the “Austrian” perspective, has a particularly devastating chapter on the New Deal, the record on unemployment.
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.
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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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