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]
It bemuses me that a certain type of commentator will often – sometimes rightly – be angered at the over-reach of Western powers’ foreign policy but be quieter about other, less obvious, intrusions if they happen when a more leftist government happens to be in power. And a lot of this sort of double-standard occurs with the United States.
Such critics appear to have been silent on the following issue: under the current Democrat presidency of Mr Obama, the US last year passed a stunningly badly crafted piece of legislation, known as FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). The law was passed at a time of what can best be described as hysteria about the amount of money that Americans were allegedly stashing abroad in places such as Switzerland, the Bahamas, the Caymans, and so forth. The major governments of the world, such as the US, Germany and UK, fondly imagine that there is, so to speak, a huge pot of gold that got lost down the back of the sofa.
What FATCA does is require any financial institution that is believed to deal with expat US citizens and Green Card holders to provide a great deal of information to the Internal Revenue Service. In other words, all manner of financial institutions, ranging from big banks to small investment boutiques, must prove to the Internal Revenue Service’s satisfaction that they have not got US citizens/GC holders on their books if they want to be unmolested by the IRS’s powers. If they have such clients or invest into the US stock market, etc, they must provide huge amounts of additional reporting data to the US. “Foreign Financial Institutions” must report investors who are taxable in the US to the US tax authorities. If they fail to do so, they pay a 30 per cent withholding tax. And proving that someone is, or might be, a US citizen might be hard, particularly if that person has been living outside the US for decades, and there is not much paperwork going back, say, 30 years.
This is a quite stunning extension of the IRS’s power around the world, affecting European, Asian, African, Latin American and other regions’ banks, who may have been blissfully unaware that some of their clients had, at any point, a US “taint”. And I am frankly astonished that not more has been said by non-US governments about this; however, given that governments such as those of Germany have resorted to the dubious practice of paying for data stolen from Swiss banks, I have no great hopes that respect for sovereignty or the rule of law applies.
The net effect of this law will be to make it even less likely that banks and other firms will want to touch Americans living outside the US due to the heavy compliance cost. The law will be a blow against globalisation and business growth, as this article at Forbes makes clear. It will be even less profitable for firms to deal with Americans if they live abroad. Those US nationals working in the City of London, for example, will find it is harder to open a bank account, manage a mutual fund or get insurance. A former US colleague of mine is in a nasty predicament. When I called the US Embassy here about the matter, I received nothing but blank ignorance.
FATCA is yet another blow against the free movement of people around the world, and will be particularly tough on the middle class, hard-working professionals who don’t have access to the flashiest lawyers and advisors. The super-rich and well-connected will, of course, be okay. I doubt that someone like the US Ambassador or military types serving abroad have even heard of it. (The US military tends not to be affected by such legislation anyway, although you can never be sure. If any serving personnel do get hit, it would be good to know the details).
It is sometimes said, by a certain type of sneering European or self-hating international travelling American, at how bad it is that all those ghastly, ignorant hicks don’t hold passports. Well, part of the reason is that getting a passport is a bureaucratic nightmare in the US. Another is that the US is a big and beautiful place with so much to see that why would any sane American want to leave for any extended period of time? But another reason is that the IRS, which is out of control, is making the process of being an expat a waking nightmare.
As for whether politicians of any kind, including the Tea Party crowd, give a flying f**k about this issue, is unclear. There may be few votes in it, but I would have more respect for supposedly libertarian-leaning GOP members such as Ron Paul, his son, or one or two others, if they could be persuaded to lobby for wholesale repeal of this atrocious piece of legislation.
If you only go to IMAO occasionally (like me), or even not at all, then allow me to pass on a recent Frank J-ism (if you will pardon the expression) which made me smile if not laugh out loud, from here:
And the thing is, maybe the economy is technically turned around and very slowly starting to go in the right direction, it’s just does Obama not expect us to not notice how far he went off course before finally getting things around? It’s like we’re driving from Newark to New York, and we’re constantly yelling at Obama, “Turn around! You’re going the wrong way!” And eventually we’re in Los Angeles, right at the shore where we can’t go any further off course, and Obama finally says, “I guess I better turn around.” And then he expects us to buy him lunch for making the smart move of turning things around. And we’re like, “Man, we were so much better off when we were back stuck in that ditch.”
I think a negative maybe got wrongly doubled sowhere near the beginning of that, but you get the point.
My approximate understanding of voters is that they do indeed vote about the immediate future, rather than reward or punish politicians for their past deeds or misdeeds, the most famous case being how British voters booted out Churchill in 1945, despite his triumphant war leadership, but because of his presumed inability to win the peace. He won in 1951 not because of his heroic past, but because of what he was then saying: set the people free.
Obama is now tanking in the polls because the US economy is now experienced as bad. If it feels like the US economy is heading in the right direction come election day, Obama could indeed win. I could go on, but prefer to leave commenters who actually live in the USA, like Paul Marks, to take that further, if they care to. I will only say that I vividly recall being told, by a visiting American at the time when President Bill Clinton was riding very low in the polls during his first term, that he had zero chance of winning again. But, he did.
I have pretty much ignored the Weiner Dong flap as I am not much fussed about how the man gets laid. Whether he is true to his wife, a kinky netizen or as much a womanizer as some of my musician friends of old does not much matter to me. His political stands would be equally obnoxious to me whether he be Saint Weiner or an alley cat guitarist. However, I could not pass up this brilliant little bit of poetic license from the always humorous Iowahawk which Taylor Dinerman pointed out to me.
`My name is Weinermandius, Dong of Dongs:
Look on my junk, ye mighty, and despair!’
As oft saith Glenn Reynolds, “Read the whole thing.”
There is a good article up at the moment by Brendan O’Neill, one of those strange “libertarians” (he’s a Marxist) hybrids who writes good sense on lifestyle issues and the environment, but a lot of guff on economics. He’s absolutely on target here about New York City and its ghastly mayor, Michael Bloomberg. (As a former news-wire journalist, I used to refer to Bloomberg, the media business, as the “Borg”, given its messianic, controlling tendencies).
Anyone who thinks that the paternalist “nudgers” are not a menace to liberty should read this article.
I love New York, and visited it earlier this year and plan to make a return journey later in 2011 as part of a business trip. It feels safe in the main; I enjoy the sights and the sounds and unlike Taki, the racist uber-paleocon who is strangely indulged in the Spectator, I don’t get het up about about the fact that there are a large number of non-whites in NYC.
I have been following this minor scandal via Instapundit. This to make clear that I am engaged in the study of American political culture, rather than wallowing in trivial scandal like wot you might of thought.
There are two things I don’t understand.
In this video (excellent snark by Real Clear Politics: they have chosen the perfect excerpt to present without comment), the question and answer go thus:
WOLF BLITZER, CNN: “Have you ever taken a picture like this of yourself?”
REP. ANTHONY WEINER (D-NY): “I can tell you this, that there are — I have photographs. I don’t know what photographs are out there in the world of me. I don’t know what have been manipulated and doctored and we’re going to try to find out what happened. But the most important reason I want to find out what happened is to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Obviously somebody got access to my account. That’s bad. They sent a picture that makes fun of the name Weiner. I get it. Touche.”
The first thing I will briefly pretend not to understand while actually understanding perfectly, as do you, is why he does not simply answer “No”.
The second thing I truly don’t understand is why he does not simply answer “Yes”.
Times have changed. It is traditional to say at this juncture, “I am not a prude, but…” . I am a prude and proud of it. I wish times had not changed (for one thing, a whole branch of humour is being rendered obsolete now that there is no need for coded language), but changed they have. Emailing pictures of one’s wedding tackle to persons of the opposite sex really is not that unusual. Sixth formers and bored secretaries get into trouble for it every week. Fumble-fingers hitting the “Send” button with the wrong email address in the little box – or the wrong group of addresses – really is not that unusual either.
Here is an interesting take on the two mainly libertarian-leaning candidates for the Republican presidential ticket: Gary Johnson and Ron Paul. Our own Brian Micklethwait has thoughts on Johnson (he’s a fan); I certainly would be more inclined, if I were a US voter, to go for GJ rather than Ron Paul. Mr Paul is sound on issues like the Federal Reserve but on a lot of stuff, his classical liberal credentials strike me as a bit suspect, although people whom I respect, like Brian Doherty of Reason magazine, say nice things about him.
Of course, the fact that such persons can have a crack at a presidential nomination is in itself a fact that separates the US from the UK. I cannot at the moment think of a single major UK Conservative politician who comes close. And as for continental Europe…….oh dear…..Silvio Berlusconi? (That was a joke).
The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and a member of the Socialist Party in France, on sexual assault charges in the USA has triggered a stream of bizarre collectivist wailing.
But why ‘disbelief’? Now I have no idea as to the merits of this particular case and thus no position on this statist bastard’s guilt in this matter, but socialists are people with a profound sense of entitlement to what other people have but are not freely willing to give up without threats of violence.
So is it hard to believe that someone whose entire world view is based on using force to take what is private without prior consent might have used force to take what they wanted from a woman? It is not really so different.
“At the moment, I am very pessimistic about the prospects for the United States solving its fiscal problems without a crisis. Given that we have divided government, a reasonable long-term budget will require a compromise. But the two sides seem to live in alternate universes. The Republicans’ alternate universe is based on the belief that government spending ought not to exceed its historical average of about 20 percent of GDP. You can’t get future spending down to that level, however, without really major cuts in future spending on Social Security and Medicare. Much as I would like to see those programs phased out completely, neither I or nor anybody else can claim to have won an election on that platform. The Democrats’ alternate universe is based on (a) the belief that the rich are not paying their share of taxes and (b) with Obamacare passed, the rise in health care spending as a share of GDP is as good as arrested. So they see no need to change the status quo on entitlements.”
I think a crisis is coming. And maybe, in a spirit of schadenfreude, we can finally prove the truth of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”, but not in a way she approves of.
I was naturally delighted to hear the news that Osama Bin Laden came to a sticky end at the hands of US SpecOps and the importance of that far outweighed my wish that someone other than the dismal Barack Obama was in the White House to take the credit.
But the extraordinarily inept manner in which the post-hit PR has been handled is just adding to the joy of the moment for me… the weird and unseemly hasty ‘burial at sea’, almost as if they are actively trying to incite the legions of conspiracy theories out there, followed by contradictory accounts of what happened and what the mission’s brief actually was…
…he was killed because he resisted arrest… no, he was killed because that was the mission objective… he was armed… no he wasn’t… he used his wife as a human shield… no he didn’t… well yes but it wasn’t his wife… or not… this son was killed… no, some other son was killed… and so on and so on…
We could be looking at the best possible outcome here: Osama dead and Obama and his team snatching PR defeat from the jaws of victory. This just keeps getting better and better!
I am pleased that Barack Obama has decided, somewhat late on, to nail the nonsense that he did not have the right basic birth certificate details to enable him to hold his office. Good. I think that some characters on the fringe have provided a free gift to opponents by turning this into an issue.
The real problem is that the US electorate, by a mixture of self-delusion and misplaced enthusiasm, voted for a man unqualified for the responsibilities of high office, and a socialist in terms of his political doctrine. For sure, he continued the high spending of his predecessor, and the TARP policies, but he stepped them up. He still seems to be in denial about the scale of the fiscal hole the US is in.
The US is not, at root, a socialist country, although its universitieis and certain towns contain a lot of people who wish the country was like their imagined Western European social democratic welfare states. The irony being, of course, that these states are falling apart, with Greece being the most egregious example. For all his supposed modern appeal, Mr Obama is a strangely old fashioned figure. I am convinced that Obama is a one-term president. In the end, silly speculation about his birth certificate will not affect things one way or the other. And let’s be honest: some of the people who were going on about this subject struck me as racists; it enabled the pro-Obama camp to claim that parts of the right did not like Obama for discreditable reasons.
Meanwhile, our own Brian Micklethwait has thoughts about who he’d like to run against Obama.
The US Civil War, a bloody conflict in which more than half a million people perished, started earlier this month, 150 years ago. I have occasionally written before about how historians, given their regional or ideological opinions, have revised the accounts of what happened, and some of the revisionists – especially from the Confederacy -friendly side, have been counter-attacked themselves. A book that stands in the revisionist tradition but which avoids some of the sillier forms of name-calling against Lincoln, while not downplaying the centralisation of power that came after the war ended, is a very fine study by Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, which I have started to read.
I see that Taki, the mega-rich columnist for the Spectator who is very much a part of the isolationist, paleocon Right, repeats the accusation that slavery, as an issue, never really emerged as a causus belli in the war until at least two years after the conflict started. That may well be true: the idea that the fight between the Union and the Confederacy was some sort of simple war between the forces of Northern good against Southern evil is wrong, or at least does not recognise the genuine grievances that some on the Southern side felt. Let’s not forget that war histories tend to get written by the victors. I can even see why some libertarians, for instance, look favourably upon the Confederacy in terms of the issues of states’ rights – if not the evil of slavery, obviously. But there are times when the enthusiasts for the Confederacy do make fools of themselves, and Taki does it with this little line in his Spectator column this week (behind a subscriber firewall)(page 55): “Lincoln did everything for effect, and his death even got him on the back of the five-dollar bill, whereas in my opinion he should have been tried in absensia for the crimes he committed during the war and the destruction he caused to one of the loveliest societies that ever existed, the antebellum south.” (Emphasis: mine). It is tempting to write Taki off as a bit of joke, a sort of ultra-conservative clown. Any man who can write of a society in which a large number of people were owned as slaves and subject to all the humiliations of slavery, as “one of the loveliest societies that ever existed”, deserves to be treated with the utmost contempt.
The scars of the Civil War still exist, and the issue has also roiled the libertarian movement in recent years. A case in point being the observations about the Lew Rockwell crowd by Timothy Sandefur, for instance.
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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