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.
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“If your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, he will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Whom do you think he will be dealing with when he needs that hip replacement in 60 years?). Even if you oppose the president on a political level, it is empirically evident that the more one hears his homilies the less inclined one is to trust him. And Obama’s penchants to lecture us endlessly, to be the center of attention endlessly and to saturate the airwaves and national conversation are clear indications that he believes government is the answer to every societal, religious, economic, and cultural question we face. Why should your kids be immune? . .Why should we deny that he can elevate our schoolchildren from the abyss so they finally, after decades of neglect, can learn again? And who better to dictate the lesson plan than the president’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, a man who left Chicago’s school district with a meager 40 percent dropout rate? Honestly, if I’m going to be badgered and browbeaten by the president every day, kids should suffer a bit, as well. “
David Harsanyi, commenting on the recent Obama broadcast to American schoolchildren.
The US Securities & Exchange Commission, which regulates US-based financial institutions, has been blasted by a report for failing to act to stop the massive Ponzi scheme fraud of Bernard Madoff, who has been jailed after admitting his crimes. The SEC, like Britain’s own Financial Services Authority, has not exactly covered itself with glory during the financial crisis.
A point worth making – since I doubt it will occur to much of the MSM to make it – is that this episode will hardly deflect policymakers from the idea of loading even heavier regulations on financial services. Our own Financial Services Authority, in the form of its chairman, Lord Adair Turner, recently reminded people of how bureacratic mindsets work by calling for a tax on financial services which he says have become “too big”. Politicians and commentators routinely describe the crisis as somehow proving that “unregulated capitalism” has failed. And yet the SEC failure over Madoff proves a very different point: you can have all the regulations in the world, but if you don’t enforce them, and financial watchdogs are run by people lacking a bit of common sense, then the regulations will be useless.
As I keep reminding people, the credit crisis and the subsequent fallout occured, primarily, right under the noses of the world’s most powerful regulators and central banks, and not some obscure Caribbean tax haven or Alpine principality. And yet the impression given is that we have lived through a sort of re-run of a Wild West movie. The truth is very different.
I came across this gem of a comment by an Obama supporter – assuming the commenter was sincere and not a troll, and it is just too good to go unremarked. The comment was made on a suitably acerbic column by Matt Welch, one of those Reasonoids who have gone very sour indeed on the US president.
Here is the comment:
“I´m american and not angry. i´m happy with our new president. vladimir putin likes him, too. looking forward to his next 3 years as president.”
Priceless.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel lays out a pretty solid case for saying that the US government will let down international borrowers, and fairly soon. This is not a new or original argument, but he does so with great aplomb. Definitely worth a read.
As FA Hayek pointed out many years ago in his masterpiece, The Constitution of Liberty, if healthcare is paid for out of general taxation and delivered free at the point of delivery, then in a world of scarce resources – and healthcare is always constrained at any time by the supply of doctors, drugs, etc – then such care must be rationed by some form of bureaucratic/political rule. As Dr Hayek presciently warned at the time (1950s), any such rationing will put doctors, politicians or other people in power in the position of a god, in having the decision about who gets treatment for what, or whether life A is more “worth saving” than life B. For example, one such utiltarian consideration might be that it is more “cost-efficient” to save the life of a young kid with his whole life ahead than an 90-year-old. That is what happens when socialised medicine is established. It transfers key powers to people in ways that raise disturbing issues of accountability and control.
Now a socialist might respond that it is still better for health care to be rationed by some rule they consider to be “fair” than by the supposed lottery of the market, although in fact, as I would respond, there is, due to the benefits of competition and entrepreneurship, far greater chance that all but the poorest will get better healthcare under a genuine free market in health than under the system of centralised, state-provided healthcare. Also, if the possession of a large fortune is partly a matter of luck, then luck, being blind, cannot be either just or unjust. It just is. Some folk have access to better dentists or whatever because they are richer. That may annoy someone who cannot afford the whitest teeth, but that is not proof of unfairness, as such. To prove it, one would have to construct an ethical theory that says that humans have an apriori claim on their fellows to receive a certain amount of healthcare/watever as a “right”. But such “rights” are abuses of the term: one cannot have a right to X that requires that another be forced to provide X, such as forcing folk to train as doctors to serve the sick, and so on.
I was led to think about the latest twist in the US healthcare debate by reading an article by the US writer, Nat Hentoff. He totally bypasses the issue of how to deal with scarcity under socialism in ways that are fair. He rightly worries about the sort of brutal choices that state-rationed healthcare provides, but then does not see that any system of state-run, and socialised medicine, makes such issues of rationing unavoidable. Rationing by such tests of age, “need” and so forth is a feature of socialised medicine, not a bug.
(H/T: The Corner).
One of the Republican senators who voted for the new US Supreme Court member has quit to “get on with his life”. As the man is a Cuban, perhaps he will consider doing that back in Cuba as clearly he cares nothing for private property rights (Sotomayor supported the majority on Kelo)… or maybe he supported Sotomayor because he thinks race trumps al?
… either way he is exactly the sort of person who needs to be drummed out of the party in disgrace.
… for the US Supreme Court. Quelle surprise, Judge Sonia Sotomayor gets approved for the highest court of the land in the USA.
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life
Thus sayeth Sonia Sotomayor in 2001. As Newt Gingrinch pointed out, can you imagine the reaction if a white male Bush appointee for the Supreme Court had ever, and I mean ever said:
I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life
The New York Times and Washigton Post would be filled cover to cover with KKK allusions and the nomination would be ‘challenging’ to say the least. But of course this only works one way.
This is yet another useful litmus test on Republican politicians (and indeed anyone who calls themselves ‘conservative’).
Did they implacably oppose Sotomayor? If not, they are indisputably and unequivocally ‘on the other side’, which is to say they are unalloyed statist collectivists and exactly the sort of people who must be driven from the party if it is even going to be worthy of the title ‘opposition’, rather than ‘Obama’s Loyal Cheerleaders’… and until the Republicans can become a meaningful opposition party, it cannot be a alternative that is worth voting for because in truth voting for such a party is just voting for more of the same, just in a different wrapper: a toxic illusion of choice.
Now is not the time for Republican unity, it is the time for for the party to tear itself apart and put a great many people to the political sword without remorse or pity… starting with nine US senators.
Brian Doherty has an article slamming the record and conduct of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. It will not be news to the likes of us hard-money advocates, but still, well worth your time.
I like Doherty’s recent book on the American libertarian movement, by the way.
Distance can lend enchantment, and I fondly remember my holiday trips out west to California, trekking in Yosemite, drinking wines in Napa, gorging on seafood in San Francisco and Monterrey, firing handguns in Santa Clara, and wandering around Getty’s art museum in Malibu. Wonderful stuff. I started going there in the early 1990s to visit an old US buddy of mine who lived in Cupertino, in the San Jose area, at the time, working in the software business, as almost everyone else there seemed to do at the time. It seemed bright, shiny and incredibly affluent. IThe locals were very friendly. It is easy to see why the area can appeal to an outsider who has become fed up with crusty old Blighty.
But, and it is one hell of a big but, California has serious problems. The state government is about to go bust. The locals seem unable to stomach voting for less spending to curb runaway debt. Thousands of firms are relocating to cheaper places to do business where the regulations are less stifling, such as Nevada or Texas. California is, in many respects, a harbinger of what could happen to the rest of the US if Mr Obama gets his way with ideas such as carbon cap and trade, socialised medicine, heavier taxes on the middle and upper classes and more regulation of business. California is as near as it gets to a European-style social democracy. Well, the results are in, ladies and gentlemen, from this experiment, and it has been a disaster.
And for that reason alone, it is hardly very reassuring that David Cameron, or iDave, as he is sometimes called for his enthusiasm for all things trendily tecchy, is looking to California as a model. Of course, there was once a part of California – Orange County – that was a hotbed of libertarian-style conservatism in the heyday of Barry Goldwater and to a certain extent, under Ronald Reagan. But unless I have missed something, that Goldwaterite spirit of rugged individualism has gone on the wane in the Golden State.
It pays to watch California. In many ways, it has been a place that has set the tone not just for politics in the US, but by extension, in other English-speaking nations. So it pays to learn the right lessons.
A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was “getting better”, for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to “stimulate the economy”), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.
So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article (“editorial”) on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:
It starts with a lie – Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to “fix American health care”.
In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.
Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts…), but stressing some specific plan to “fix American health care” was not one of them.
Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.
“Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system” even for a magazine “as economically liberal as this one”.
This is a standard Economist trick – propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of “economically liberal”), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market – but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.
However, we are not “starting from scratch” so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations – facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile – it suggests five years. → Continue reading: The ‘Economist’ and American health care
Here is a revealing article in the Washington Post – hardly a newspaper of the conservative or libertarian side – that mocks the fawning treatment of Mr Obama by much of the press. Things change but there are continuities: I can remember how Tony Blair, or, for a while, Bill Clinton got such an easy ride in the press. The media was studiously easy on JFK in the early 1960s and covered up Kennedy’s numerous extra-marital affairs. Sure, Bush jnr got an easy ride from some of the Right – remember when Andrew Sullivan practically wrote love letters to Dubya before the gay marriage thing sent Sully off the edge? – but there was not the kind of broad-based cult of worship that there now is around the community organiser from Chicago.
Apart from Fox, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, a few niche publications like the American Spectator and the blogs, Mr Obama has had a remarkably easy ride and it does not seem to be ending soon. In part this is because much of the liberal media, even if some of its more intelligent denizens know that this is a bit silly, are playing as a “team” for Their Man, and don’t want to be seeing doing anything that might help the other side.
There has always been, and always will be, slanted coverage of public affairs, and it will continue. Even if the BBC in the UK were scrapped tomorrow and its reporters sent off to planet Titan, the fact is that there will be a substantial block of leftish/liberal media types and pundits. But the sheer, jaw-dropping bias of the White House press corps is something to behold. But maybe, just maybe, there are signs of cracks in the facade. I cannot help but think that Obama has, by trying to be all cool and sophisticated over the Iranian turmoil, started to piss off even parts of his side. He does not walk on water, and it is about time that this fact was noted. The stance now adopted by the media is not one suitable for self-respecting adults.
Millions and millions of Americans support Obama’s desire to even more massively intervene in the market for medical care than the US state already does. And of course Obama’s moves are just the opening salvo in a desire to eventually end up with fully socialist healthcare, along the lines of Britain’s ghastly National Health Service, which has intermittently tried to kill me over the years.
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
Well yes, it will be different… in that the control obsessed Obama’s of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today.
This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry… plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar.
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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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