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The Telegraph has picked up an interesting story from the Los Angeles Times: “Polling putting Democratic Socialist in the lead was fake, admits firm”
Polling that projected a Democratic Socialist candidate had a commanding lead over her main rival was fake.
Progressive Francesca Hong was seen as a front-runner in the primary to be the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor, but went on to lose.
Median Strategies, which billed itself as a trustworthy, non-partisan polling company, projected that Ms Hong had a more than 20-point lead over moderate David Crowley.
However, on Aug 11, she narrowly lost to Mr Crowley, handing establishment Democrats a win following a wave of victories by Left-wing candidates.
Median Strategies has now admitted the polling data were faked and part of a “short-term social experiment”, following a report by The Los Angeles Times.
Note that, although in that primary Median Strategies falsely raised the hopes of the extreme Left, in another contest the company put out fake polling that exaggerated the lead of the establishment Democrat over the extreme leftist:
The company had also released incorrect data showing Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, had a double-digit lead over Nithya Raman, a city council member and Democratic Socialist, before the mayoral run-off in November.
I don’t know quite what to think of this. The Telegraph commenters, few of whom appear have read as far as the part about Bass vs Raman, think that this proves their long-held suspicion that all polls are lies put out by left wingers to artificially boost support for left wing ideas. This suspicion is not true. Polls are frequently wrong, they are sometimes skewed by the political biases of the people who set the questions and interpret the answers, but they are not generally made up. Reputable polling companies like YouGov and Ipsos scarcely make any profit from their political polls; their real business is market research. They do the voting intention polls to demonstrate their honesty, and to show that opinion polls can tease out meaningful information from the background noise. And I hate to say it, but millions upon millions of people truly support left wing ideas because it would be so nice if you really could make people rich and safe and good by decree.
Getting back to Median Strategies, I see that the US media fell for the hoax. For once, I do not blame them. It was a genuinely interesting experiment but it destroys trust. Perhaps that is a good thing in a world full of increasingly sophisticated lies, but, somehow, this obscure story about some fake polls in a foreign country disturbed me more than one would expect.
“The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become `common goods and utilities.'”
– Ryan Bourne
Our new Prime Minister is taking action to protect British people against unfair dealing.
“It should be just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to start it. And if something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price”, he says. Sounds fair.
Darren Jones is stuck paying for some subscriptions that he doesn’t use or want and has asked for Mr Burnham’s help:
And on the scourge of fake price reductions, Anna Ridgway asks,
Peggy Noonan is not a columnist I agree with on everything but she seems at times to have a knack of getting to the nub of a trend, a cultural shift, or however else one wants to call it. She has this WSJ ($) article out about the socialists now pushing – successfully it seems – to take over control of the Democratic Party. It means that the US will at some point face an unappealing choice if, say, JD Vance, who appears to be quite hostile on the free market, is the Republican Party nominee. (For what it is worth, that’s not a foregone conclusion in my view.)
A few paragraphs:
Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously as a factor in our politics and the Democratic Party. A CNN/SSRS poll issued this week reported 34% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as “democratic socialists.” That number won’t be depressed by the success of Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Michigan on Tuesday by racking up huge margins in progressive enclaves and university towns.
Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.
I am sorry to say these democratic socialists never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.
I think the lack of empathy and a sense of rootedness to the realities of most people is what will hopefully be fatal to these folk (consider that lout, Hasan Piker, with his apologetics and even open admiration for the Soviet Union, Mao and even N. Korea and his hatred of Israel). But the implosion of this trend is not a given. It has to be argued against, unpacked and exposed. My worry is that too few are doing it. (In Piker’s case, I see him as someone who is trying to be more and more disgusting and outrageous in pursuit of attention. However, there is a chance that he actually believes what he writes and says, and that he has gone psychotic, which is where I think the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are now these days.)
Noonan identifies what she thinks are three causal factors behind this resurgent socialism, or at least a desire by socialists to proclaim that is what they are, rather than use euphemisms:
A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.
A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?
The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.
As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.
Towards the end of the article Noonan (a former speechwriter for Reagan), has this:
It’s our view here that free-market capitalism is organic and flows upward from the human person—man wants to build, trade, invent, provide for and rise, and he erects laws and a way of economic being that allows the realization of those desires. Economic freedom works with human nature. The rules and regulations it produces, the economic framework it creates, are like what Churchill said of democracy: the worst system except for all the others. Socialism is a more abstract and ideological vision of justice that doesn’t flow up but must be imposed from the top down. It isn’t based on the natural, or on man as he is; it’s a construct that involves coercion.
There is a problem with the Noonan article, however, which slightly taints it. I would dissent from saying that capitalism, or open market economy, is the “worst possible system except for all the others”, to borrow from Churchill, because I think that concedes too much to those who want to tap into the idealism of youth. That sort of perspective does not appeal to people with ideological fire in their belly. It also sells free market capitalism and several private property short. “The free market“ is a term that covers the idea of people using their skills and talents to obtain their wants and goals in voluntary interactions with their fellows, recognising that ownership of property – an extension of the of idea of humans as owning their own lives. This is not just the “least-worst” state of affairs. It is a positive, glowing, glorious good set of values to set out and defend. Defenders of the classical liberal tradition, to use that term, need to stop the throat-clearing urge to half-apologise for this worldview before getting going. When they do that, they’ve already lost people.
There is intriguing paragraph, regarding a biography of the French political figure Andre Malraux, about whom a biography has been written:
At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.
Definitely one of the better articles on what has been going on in the US, in my view.
“The modern socialist imagination is a magical kingdom where doctors, nurses, professors, builders, electricians, and day care workers all report for duty because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling Instagram video.”
– “Ivana“, a Substack author.
The whole item is a gem. It is also funny because it is true, even if I quibble about the author’s comment that housing is a “right” and that big business should be broken up by anti-trust. Even so, for political perceptiveness, this is good.
A chap called John Russo, whose comments I follow on LinkedIn, takes aim at the recent pattern of well-off people joining “Patriotic Millionaire” calls for folk like them to be taxed a lot more. An obvious retort is that all they need to do is set up a direct debit with the relevant revenue body, and job done. Oddly, I rarely see such “Patriotic” rich folk saying “yes, of course, I will get that done immediately”. And I suspect a reason is that they want to sound good, and also like the idea of people being coerced. The coerced transfer in the name of “fairness” is the point. Voluntarily giving some of your money to the State is a bit, well, too voluntary.
Anyway, some paragraphs from Mr Russo:
I realised there’s a special kind of hypocrisy in preaching equality from the elevated comfort of elite media, elite networks, and elite platforms.
The idea of a wealth tax has been around for decades, but suddenly it’s being sold as the grand answer to Britain’s economic and social problems.
That’s the pitch. Simple. Catchy. Morally flattering. And, if you don’t look too closely, it’s vaguely heroic.
But the truth is less glamorous. A wealth tax isn’t a bold reform. It’s often a slogan in search of a serious policy, and a performance of fairness that doesn’t come close to fixing the machinery underneath.
Yes, Britain has inequality. Yes, too many people feel shut out while a narrow group sits on significant assets. But that does not make every proposal for taxing wealth a useful one. Britain isn’t America. We don’t have California-scale concentrations of extreme wealth, and we don’t have an economic structure that can pretend a wealth tax is some great fiscal breakthrough.
The sums being talked about sound large until you place them next to the scale of the state. Then they look less like transformation and more like loose change with a manifesto attached.
The hypocrisy is that some of the loudest advocates of wealth taxes talk as though they are speaking for the squeezed and the overlooked. In reality, they are often highly visible, highly connected, and very comfortable participants in the same media and political ecosystem they claim to be challenging. They denounce concentrated power while depending on the attention economy, elite networks and moral theatre to amplify their own status. It’s a neat trick. Condemn privilege from within a system that rewards you for sounding rebellious.
Clive Crook, a columnist in Bloomberg, does not mince his words about the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who appears to be of the view that the pro-market reforms of Mrs Thatcher and some of her successors (not nearly pro-market enough, in my view), were all a terrible mistake. We should, according to Mr Burnham, look back with fondness with what came before. (The Institute of Economic Affairs has this rather nice takedown.)
Crook is having none of this blather. Here are a few paragraphs from the article, which is paywalled, so I won’t quote the whole piece.
If all that’s holding the United Kingdom back is the country’s mood, then the arrival of Andy Burnham as prime minister might improve its prospects. Briefly. If the remedy also requires some particle of coherence and clarity about what the government needs to do, the prognosis is grim. The contradictions and absurdities that he’s ventured so far are remarkable even by the standards of modern British politics.
To start with the most bewildering, Burnham is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s? He was alive in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power — but nine years old at the time, perhaps not paying close attention. A slightly older cohort recalls the immediate pre-Thatcher years as an unparalleled disaster, which helps explain why her party won that election and the three that followed.
The nadir was the “winter of discontent”: strikes in response to the Labour government’s efforts to curb inflation, shortages of food and fuel, trash piled 10 feet deep in London’s squares (Leicester Square was known as Fester Square; you could smell it from Downing Street), more strikes, pickets blockading hospitals, corpses stored here and there while gravediggers pressed for better terms, more strikes. Returning from a little downtime in Barbados, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan sealed his party’s fate by saying he was puzzled by all the talk of crisis.
This was apparently the golden time that preceded the unforced errors of the 1980s and the following decades, when a global plague of market fundamentalism brought the country low and destroyed the dreams of working families.
Admittedly, despising Thatcher and her works will always be an article of faith for the British left. Burnham is hardly unusual in this respect. What’s more surprising, especially for a leader who says he means to unite the country and overcome factionalism in his party, is to extend much the same contempt to the pragmatic center-leftists led by Tony Blair, who resuscitated Labour after two decades of humiliating defeat and set the country on a more moderate, popular, social-democratic course. It isn’t just Thatcherism that Burnham aims to reverse, but “four decades of neoliberalism.”
Bring back council estates, cheap buses and organized labor. Nationalize a few industries. Maybe reopen some mines (though, obviously, people wouldn’t be allowed to burn the coal).
“Burnham to scrap Starmer’s digital ID scheme in ‘reset of priorities’”, the Guardian reports.
Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday.
The new Labour leader plans to redirect the resources earmarked for the scheme towards tackling the cost of living, his team indicated on Saturday.
The Guardian understands the proposals are being outlined in an attempt to distance the incoming prime minister from unpopular choices made by his predecessor. A petition opposing the introduction of digital ID cards when it was announced last year attracted about 3m signatures.
Well done to all who signed it.
“One of the first things this government will do is put its focus where people need it right now: creating breathing space and delivering change they can feel in their everyday lives,” Burnham’s spokesperson said.
“That means all the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living.
Although the cost of the scheme would have been great (projected to be 1.8 billion pounds and we all know it would have gone astronomically over budget), the foolish things Mr Burnham will do with the money saved, such as free bus travel for 11-16 year olds according to the Telegraph, will add to inflation, making the cost of living higher.
But the money scarcely matters. The important thing is that this series of Yookay ends with Starmer’s monster being chased away. It’ll come back, it always does. Some of those old Blair episodes were right scary before they announced “Giant ID computer plan scrapped”. But for now, let the credits roll and make yourself a cup of tea.
When you’ve lost the Guardian…
How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson review – how did this end up such an embarrassment?
This evangelising of a wealth tax should have made for a truly amazing documentary. But it allows its host to be totally out-argued by all his interviewees. Why?
[…]
The first is that Stevenson is not an appealing presenter. He has an adolescent bullishness about him that comes across badly on screen, raising a sort of fight-or-flight response in the viewer instead of encouraging engagement. The strident idealism that infuses his speech and style is hard enough to take from the young, where it at least belongs, but it sits less well on a 39-year-old – adults should have the confidence, the experience and the wisdom that offers more.
The second is that he is outdone and undone by almost all of his interviewees. Telecoms mogul Bassim Haidar, who was in the headlines last year for switching allegiance and donations from the Conservative party to Reform, does it through politeness. He invites Stevenson to address what he would do when his proposed tax caused investors like him to pull all their money out of the UK and find somewhere friendlier instead. Twenty-eighth generation landowner Francis Fulford (yes, of The F**king Fulfords and Life is Toff fame, but here in less eccentric mode) does it with robust jocularity (“The values you are basing your figures on will collapse! It’s Noddyland – it won’t work”) and inquiries as to how asset-rich but income-poor rich people like him will pay. Andrew Henderson of Nomad Capitalist, which advises clients on how to minimise their tax liabilities by moving countries, does it through sheer belligerence (“I don’t think life is fair and I think that fundamentally upsets people who talk about inequality because you feel entitled to rich people’s money”). Tax lawyer and adviser Dan Neidle deals the final blow towards the end of the programme by summing up the underlying problem of everything that has gone before. “You are unable,” he tells Stevenson coolly but firmly, “to separate your emotional reaction to inequality from a rational assessment of the best tools for it.”
This, really, is where a truly amazing documentary could have begun. Instead of Stevenson being left floundering, without convincing comebacks to any of them (was he not briefed? Was he paralysed in front of the camera? Has he simply spent too much time preaching to the choir and forgotten what it’s like to be challenged? Or is Neidle right in his frustrated pronouncement that “There’s no evidence you’ve ever thought about it!”), we could have had an hour of him being led through wider issues by a genuine expert and letting us all learn something along the way. This way was just a faintly embarrassing waste of time.
This is an honest and perceptive review from the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan – the “Mindless ‘Inequality’ Blather” tag is meant to apply to Gary Stevenson’s TV show, not to her review of it – but I cannot help wondering whether her question about Stevenson (“Has he simply spent too much time preaching to the choir and forgotten what it’s like to be challenged?”) is a coded message to her fellow Guardian journalists, and to the left as a whole.
“Invest in Britain or I’ll force you to, minister tells pension funds”, the Guardian reports:
The business secretary, Peter Kyle, has told UK pension funds to “get off their high horses” and invest in Britain or be forced to do so by law.
Expressing frustration at the level of investment in British companies after years of government initiatives, Kyle said the UK’s biggest asset managers “should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success”.
“I don’t think mandation is ideal in any circumstances. But I’ll use it if I have to, because I’m in a rush,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian on the sidelines of an event at Lloyds Banking Group’s headquarters in London, he said he was “fed up” with being asked by the City to tweak regulations to boost investment in the UK economy, only to see a lack of investment follow government reforms.
“Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not,” he said.
“They are representing British savers. And so they should feel a patriotic duty in making Britain a success. And not just sitting aside from the economy, in a walled-off garden. They are out there with the rest of us. They need to get off their high horses.”
Yes, the pension funds are representing British savers. Which means the only duty those pension fund managers should “feel” is the duty they have by law; their fiduciary duty to those savers to invest those savers’ money in the way that is best for those savers. Not best for Britain-as-a-whole, and certainly not some politician’s pet project that nobody in their right minds would risk tuppence on if they were not forced to do it. Best for those savers. Because it is their money. Sorry to labour that point, but it is a point Labour seem to have difficulty absorbing.
And you won’t make Britain a success by forcing people to “invest” (what a lie that word is) in the way the Government tells them to. Britain’s historical success was built on being one of the few countries where people could invest their money as seemed best to them.
Did you notice the mafia-like threat in Peter Kyle’s words “Don’t make us come back, because we’ve got lots of other things we want to do … It feels like they are still sitting on the fence, so will more powers be needed? I hope not”?
Kyle has form on that. This time last year, when he was Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, he said that to question the Online Safety Act is to side with child abusers. His specific target was Nigel Farage, but he applied the same sentiment to everyone. In his own words,
“I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?”
“The richest persons in Africa are heads of state, governors and ministers. So every ‘educated’ African who wants to be rich – and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich – heads straight into government or politics.”
– Ghanaian economist George Ayittey
Found via this tweet from Students For Liberty:
The Guardian phrases its description of what the EU is doing more sympathetically – “EU introduces €3 customs charge on small parcels to curb cheap Chinese imports” – but the end result is the same.
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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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