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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Tired of the orgy of Kerry worship from the British media, not just the BBC, but also from ITV and C4, I turned to the internet for some other news from the United States.
As expected, propositions 57 and 58 passed in California. Prop 57 being approval to borrow billions of Dollars (sorry ‘issue bonds’) in order to ‘pay for’ already agreed government spending, and Prop 58 being a promise (sort of) not to borrow money in future.
However, I came upon another proposition – Prop 55. This prop was a request to borrow (again sorry ‘issue bonds’) – $12.3 billion for government education spending on top of what had already been agreed. This bond debt to be on top of the $73 billion bond debt that the State already has.
The prop passed – I admit that it passed only narrowly (50.6% to 49.4%), but it passed.
So on the same day that Californians agreed (in Prop 57) to borrow another $15 billion (or so) for existing spending and (in Prop 58) overwhelmingly voted not to pile up more spending… they in fact did just that.
“We will not add deficit spending on to the deficit spending we already have”
…except that more deficit spending is indeed added and on the very same day.
That sums up politics – not just in California, but everywhere.
Nick Forte has some good news in the struggle for ideas in the USA
The advocates for smaller government appear to be winning the war of ideas on this side of the pond if the following Rasmussen poll is accurate. For a long time I believed this to be the case, but I was surprised by the margin shown in the poll.
February 16, 2004–Sixty-four percent (64%) of American voters say that they prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes. A Rasmussen Reports survey finds that just 22% would rather see a more active government with more services and higher taxes.
What is even more amazing is that even a majority of Democrats hold this view. Only the extreme left prefer more government over less government, and even then by not as large of a margin as one might have guessed.
Support for smaller government cuts across just about all demographic lines . It is the preference for 67% of men and 62% of…
[…]
… group, 49% say they want a more active government with more services and higher taxes. Just 40% prefer smaller government
It will be interesting to see how this will affect US politics. So far, President Bush has not been able to capitalize on what should be a Republican issue because he has been seen (accurately) as big spender despite his tax cuts. Somewhat counter-intuitively, an earlier Rasmussen poll shows that more Americans voters view the front running liberal New England Democratic presidential candidate as better able to control spending than the purportedly conservative Texan Republican candidate (42% to 33%).
There is indeed growing discontent among conservatives over Bush’s spending record. Last week, House Republicans held a ‘mandatory’ conference to come up with ideas to curtail runaway government spending. Among the more radical initiatives under discussion are measures to curb the power of House authorizers and appropriators who have routinely ignored budget limits, giving the budget resolution the force of law, and requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House and the Senate to pass spending provisions which exceed the budget.
Although some Republican members of Congress are true believers in the need to reduce the size of government, many more are probably reacting to concerns that Americans are turning to the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, undercutting a traditional GOP advantage. Could it be that political pressures for lower spending has finally overtaken the normal election year drive by politicians to buy more votes through higher government spending? Recent actions by Congress suggest not, but I remain cautiously optimistic.
Nick Forte
Falls Church, Virginia
Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait
Midge Decter
Regan Books, 2003
This sympathetic study can almost be regarded as a pre-emptive strike from the right from someone whose neo-con credentials are impeccable. Her personal motives or incentives to write the book are not clearly and explicitly given, but the Prelude, which comes between the Acknowledgements and the Introduction, gives perhaps a hint that Rumsfeld’s appeal to women, even at age 70, might have something to do with it. Perhaps again she views him at the right distance; she has known him for several years, certainly not intimately and through official contact. The inside of the dustjacket has a sub-title, not found elsewhere: The Making of an American Icon. The man himself is not given to self-revelation and the impression is that he knows when best to keep his mouth shut – and those of any others that might be tempted to speak for him.
Born in 1932 and therefore “too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam” (p. 178), the chief influences on his early life, though indirect, were the Depression and World War II; his father, who worked as an estate agent, first for a firm, then for himself, went into the US Navy at a mature age and his mother followed him with her family to each port nearest his assignment. Donald was successful at school; though too lightly built for American football, he became a champion wrestler, continuing to be one when he followed his father into the Navy.
He went to Princeton ( “the most military of the Ivy League colleges” – p. 31) on a scholarship, studying “government and politics” and passed into the US naval air arm, also on a scholarship and hence as an officer, marrying his schoolmate Joyce and introducing her into the same peripatetic way of life his parents had had. During his years of service, 1955-7, he became a pilot trainer and then went to Washington to enter politics as a Republican, working first as a staff assistant for a member of the House of Representatives.
He was elected to Congress himself in 1962. He served for six years (3 terms) and was then invited by Nixon in 1968 to join the Executive in the White House. He was put in charge of the Office for Economic Opportunity, about as far left an organisation as a Republican could stomach and the setting up of which he’d opposed – but Nixon had, after all, been elected after the student riots and general mayhem that concluded Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Even worse was to be put in charge of a Cost of Living Council, a thinly disguised Prices and Incomes Enforcement Body, a concept to which he was totally opposed. Neither of these bodies, both totally of the contemporary Zeitgeist, would work – or survive.
Soon after Nixon was re-elected in 1972, he appointed Rumsfeld US Ambassador to NATO, who thus avoided contamination with the messiness associated with Nixon’s having to resign in 1974 because of Watergate. He was recalled to the White House by Ford, an old friend, first to sort out the new presidential team, then to become Ford’s Chief of Staff and finally his Secretary for Defence. He was thus involved with the policy of detente with the USSR and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), but though loyal to Ford’s initiatives, clashed with Kissinger about how far to follow them up, making Kissinger characterise him as “ruthless”, i.e., someone who stood up to him and carried his point. → Continue reading: Rumsfeld – American Icon
In addition to loving skyscrapers I also have a thing about bridges, and I periodically feature a picture of a bridge at my Culture Blog. Sometimes the pictures are taken by me, of one or other of the many bridges of London. Sometimes they are acquired from the infinity of information that is the Internet.
Some while ago I featured the Coronado Bridge, which is next to San Diego. In that connection someone else drew my attention to another splendid bridge in Macao. Commenting on that posting, Phil Cohen has this to say about the Coronado Bridge:
The original design for the Coronado Bridge was a much shorter, and almost straight span to the Island (actually, peninsula). Then in order to qualify for federal funding, (whereby our government pays most of the tab), the City of San Diego curved and lengthened the bridge to meet the minimum length standard that would qualify the Coronado Bridge for Federal funding.
How about that for an unintended consequence of taxpayer funding. They help you if yours is a long bridge, so San Diego builds a long bridge instead of a short bridge!
If you want to see even more clearly what Phil Cohen is talking about, just take a look at this map!
It is very rare that government spending has such conspicuously visible results. Normally, when governments waste money – which is what they mostly do with money, after all – the waste all happens tucked away in offices and in the form of a few thousand quietly invisible salaries for suburbanites. For every Concorde or Space Shuttle or daft piece of architecture there are a hundred bits of wastage that are no more exciting to look at than evaporating water. But this Coronado Bridge story really makes the point.
Personally I prefer the highly visible kind of government wastage. First, it is often, as with this bridge, and as with Concorde, very pretty to look at. Second, it very prettily dramatises how wasteful government spending can be, and I like that even more.
The daft furor over the outsourcing of job to India (and other places) is just another example of how amazingly primitive the understanding of economics is which prevails amongst the media and political elites in the USA (though no worse than elsewhere I might add).
The same troglodyte notions that lead people to think that cheaper foreign steel being imported into the USA is a bad thing (which is just another way of saying that manufacturing cheaper cars, homes and ships in the USA are a bad thing), lead the same people to in effect say that allowing Americans to purchase cheaper computer programs and requiring them to pay more for call center services is also a bad thing.
President Bush went on the defensive Thursday on the issue of outsourcing after a firestorm erupted over an aide’s contention that free flow of jobs, including the migration of services to India, benefited the US economy in the long run.
Although the aide, White House economic adviser Greg Mankiw, was merely echoing what was stated in Bush’s economic report to Congress, Washington’s political class came down on him like a ton of bricks.
Lawmakers from both parties, including Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, demanded he be fired. The criticism forced Mankiw, a Harvard economist, to clarify that he did not mean to support or praise loss shifting of US jobs overseas.
Sure, if your IT or helpdesk job as just been outsourced to Bombay, it might seem like A Bad Thing for you personally… but then that is just as true if your job in New Jersey has just been taken by someone in Biloxi, Mississippi because your company has just relocated to where costs (and taxes) are cheaper… the overall effect is that companies, and outsourcable functions of companies, will go wherever it makes sense for them to go… and so they should!
However notion that India has such a comparative advantage just because they have produced a reasonable pool of IT and call centre people who will work for far less than their counterparts in California does rather miss the obvious fact that India is far from suitable for all or even most IT or call centre jobs. Troubleshooting a network in Texas is rather hard to do from New Delhi and to think people in Asia will have such a deep understanding of American (or British or European) cultural mores that all help desks and call centres will end up there is rather bizarre. Companies who out-source unsuitable jobs will end up being punished by the market if their quality falls below the point which lower costs can offset such a fall, and some jobs are very quality sensitive indeed.
It should be screamingly obvious that stopping people in India (and elsewhere) from exploiting their competitive advantages does not only hurt them, it hurts everyone who is a customer for those products. Rather than engaging in unbecoming grovelling, George ‘Steel & Lumber Tariff’ Bush should redeem himself by responding to the Troglodyte faction by pugnaciously asking them “So, what exactly did the American consumer do to you to make you hate them so much, guys?”
If a company is not free to run their business and the location of the people who make it work, to best suit the company’s interests, who pays in the end? The company’s customers do, of course. And that means you.
While searching for an article I am absolutely certain I wrote but cannot find, I came across this article. I wrote it not long after 9/11 and I would not change a word of it.
Let me first of all state my basic position. I love America. There, I have said it. But I think there is a problem. I think the citizens of the United States are deluding themselves that they live in the ‘Land of the Free’.
As I write this, in the downtown financial district of Boston Massachusetts, I am a hundred and fifty yards from the site of the historic Boston Tea Party, right here on the harbour lip of Fort Point Channel. In my opinion this site rates as one of the most significant places on Earth, third in my list of inspirational locations which I have personally visited, right behind Avebury and Stonehenge, and even creeping ahead of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Yes, I am one of those obsessive libertarians. I really am that sad.
Because in the future, when all of the current omnipotent state machines of the world have shrunk to nothing, this site in Boston harbour will be hailed as the Mohawk-dressed pinprick which first burst their bubble, the very point in space and time where the idea of the necessity of the state first started to die.
Birthplace of a libertarian revolution But I fear we have a long road to travel before we reach that heady day, when the final Byzantine Emperor of the state is killed defending its walls of mediocrity, defending its rights to general taxation, and defending its monopoly provision of both justice and security. Because what I discovered, in Boston, admittedly in a state which ought to be renamed Taxachusetts, was a shock. → Continue reading: Letter from America – Land of the Free?
Sitting in London and watching the New Hampshire primary is a strange experience. The ‘Republicrats’ have a disgraceful advantage built into the US election process with different laws applying to their candidates than for those of other parties.
For British readers it is as though the Liberal Democrats had to get up to three or four million signatures on a petition to be allowed to appear on the ballot paper, as opposed to the £150 fee and a copy of the party’s constitution to the Electoral Commission and 6,590 voters to sign nomination papers for the whole country.
The good bit about primaries, which have no equivalent in the UK, is that the remote suited class gets a sustained exposure to public opinion, before the voters have to choose which licensed thief to put in charge. In Britain, all the Democrat nominees would be elected to Parliament, however extreme or daft their ideas, because of the way that candidates are appointed. Those that failed to win an election would stand a good chance of being appointed to the House of Lords for life or made the director of some welfare agency. → Continue reading: Primary colours
Thought Mesh has a post that captures the lefty/statist mindset like an entomologist with a nice long needle.
I made the mistake (again!) of listening to the local NPR station. One of their features is a segment where a law professor opines on society and the law. She’s not always a complete loon. Today she was only semi-loony in a paean to an associate of hers who was a crusader for the poor. What he did, according to her, was encourage the “oppressed” to become involved in politics. The view was that this was not only a good thing in itself, but enabled those involved to “take charge of their own lives”. But politics is primarily about taking charge of other people’s lives. It is precisely those in charge of themselves that have no need of politics. The commentator then listed the marvelous things that this involvement in politics had yielded – primarily recreational projects built at taxpayer expense. So it boiled down in the end to forming gangs and using the power of that gang to extract money from other people. I was hoping for “started businesses”, “got jobs”, “became educated” kind of things. But apparently that’s not the way the poor and oppressed should improve their lot, by improving themselves and their families. Instead they should get together to get their slice of pork. Not quite the uplifting saga of the American Dream one might hope for.
Of course, the fact that this particular lefty statist found a taxpayer-subsidized outlet on National Public Radio is just the icing on the cake.
From the Guardian, a perfect illustration of the importance of ‘anti-junk-food’ campaigning as the newfound cause du jour of the British left. It is hard to tell which aspect of his own report the author finds more disturbing: capital punishment or the lack of healthy food options for the condemned:
Raymond Rowsey got his deadly dose on January 9, in North Carolina. The sole white among these executed men, Rowsey was convicted for the killing of a convenience store clerk – or perhaps his accomplice half-brother did it, no one seemed quite sure at the trial. Their takings? Two pornographic magazines and $54. Rowsey had a history of horrific childhood abuse. His last meal was pizza, chicken wings, two packets of peanut M&Ms, and a Pepsi.
Junk food and judicial killing. Feel queasy?
But would not the offer of a balanced, healthy last meal be a bit…well, redundant?
A sign of health from the larger body politic spotted at, of all places, the Detroit Auto Show. Brock Yates of the Wall Street Journal notes that the massively cool show features gargantuan amounts of the horsepower so beloved of the masses, and very little of that underpowered PC crap prescribed by our putative betters.
Utopians might expect that the auto makers will offer countless octane-stingy hybrids and zero-emission fuel-cell vehicles to a public seeking to wean itself from all addiction to the cursed internal combustion engine. Sadly, this is not the case. Tree-huggers and Friends of the Earth would be better advised to picnic on the banks of the Love Canal than to set foot in the vast precincts of Detroit’s Cobo Hall.
On the pole position, as it were, was the rakish Chrysler ME412, a so-called halo car (read image-builder) coupe that, thanks to four turbochargers pumping high-test into its gasping 12 cylinders, produces 850 horsepower. DaimlerChrysler engineers who developed the monster claim it will generate top speeds approaching 250 miles an hour.
Throughout Cobo Hall lurk dozens of such muscle cars, Ferraris, Vipers, Lamborghinis, BMWs, Jaguars, Audis, Acuras, et al., ready and willing to tear up pavements and strike the fear of God into unwitting passengers at the touch of the throttle. Four hundred horsepower is not unusual. Three hundred horsepower can be found under the hoods of literally dozens of sedans and SUVs. Two hundred horsepower is simply not worth mentioning.
Sounds like fun to me. Chicago is having its auto show in a few weeks. Its been a few years since I went, so I do believe I will drive (yes, drive – probably in my full-size pickup, thank you) down for a look. The larger point is slipped in at the end of the piece:
The lure of the open road increases by the day. With it comes the romance–perceived or otherwise–of a freedom ride at the wheel of an automobile. This is a hateful thought for greenies, social engineers, media elites and intellectuals everywhere, but the lunatic love affair with the car remains in a state of steamy passion.
There is no debating that hybrids and fuel cells make sense in terms of the environment and reducing fossil-fuel dependence. But until these new powerplants can equal current conventional gasoline engines in terms of performance, cost and durability, auto makers will respond to the harsh realities of the marketplace. No amount of government mandates, media pressure or high-minded pontifications can replace the simple laws of supply and demand.
The internal combustion automobile is one of the biggest engines of personal liberty ever created, right up there with the firearm. With it, the individual is free to leave the jurisdiction, free to travel on his own schedule, and free to haul an enormous amount of stuff around with him if he desires. “Mass” transit trains its users to be livestock, and so it is no wonder that our putative betters are constantly trying force us into its cattle cars. The old saw about totalitarian governments making the trains run on time cuts deeper than many think. By contrast, the automobile makes you captain of your own ship.
Enough with the mixed metaphors. The American insistence on bigger and more powerful automobiles, and continued avoidance of mass transit except as an utter last resort, should give lovers of liberty cause for cheer.
The trial of American businesswoman Martha Stewart is shortly about to get underway. I am, on the basis of what I have read about the charges brought against her, unconvinced she was guilty of insider trading, and in fact deeply disturbed that prosecutors have chosen to go ahead with this case on the basis of what looks like thin evidence, as described in detail in this article in Reason magazine.
I have a problem with insider trading as it is defined by lawmakers in the United States, Europe, and in certain other parts of the world. In all too many cases, insider trading is so loosely defined that any entrepreneur with a quick dialing finger and fast ability to spot information – surely a praiseworthy thing – could, according to some definitions, be found guilty of insider trading. Insider trading has become rather similar to anti-trust in this regard, in that capitalist-bashing lawmakers can use it to cut down the successful.
I do not see any relief coming soon from our legislators. Insider trading is often a way for politically ambitious legislators and public prosecutors to make a name for themselves. And even in those cases where a chief executive or other senior business person has acted wrongly, one usually finds that the act in question amounted to fraud, theft or some other crime already covered in company and in our existing Common law. For example, if say, CEO Fred Smith uses information obtained in secret and in a way that violates his own company’s rules, he should be sacked for breaking company rules and the terms of his contract. No broader insider trading law is necessary.
Also, there is no reason why, for example, a market like the Nasdaq exchange could not stipulate that all listed firms adhere to certain standards of corporate behaviour. Exchanges which let companies do what they want may have to pay a “reputational price” in that some investors will choose to migrate to more upright exchanges. This happens to a certain extent already, because stock exchanges in countries with loose regulations and opaque reporting standards – as has been the case in parts of Latin America, for example – lose out to exchanges like the Dow Jones our own FTSE. In fact, globalisation is forcing a “race to the top” in terms of corporate behaviour as stock market leaders around the world seek to attract capital. The market wins again. (By the way, the collapse of Italian food group Parmalat has helped underscore the reputational damage to a whole country – in this case Italy – when a firm is thought to have behaved wrongly).
On a more economically theoretical basis, insider trading, even if one could definite it clearly, usually poses no actual “harm” either to the broader investor if one accepts that capital markets are typically highly efficient in these days, when price anomalies are usually exposed in seconds in this electronic age.
Time to put insider trading laws under the spotlight, and hopefully, in the dustbin.
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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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