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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Today’s SQotD is already taken, and in any case yesterday’s SQotD was also about banking, but here is more quotability, from regular quotee here, Steve Baker MP, writing for the Spectator Blog about the LIBOR scandal:
The really important question today is not whether the Bank of England encouraged manipulation of credit markets by self-interested rogues but why we tolerate systematic credit market manipulation by the central banks as a matter of policy: nowhere else in the economic system would we accept explicit planning of the price and quantity of a vital commodity. If it worked, we’d all be communists.
In the Cobden Centre round robin email flagging up this piece, the words “linked from Guido” were included in the email title. This stuff is not merely being said, relentlessly. It is getting around.
Here is some further evidence of that, from the BBC:
A popular solution to the financial crisis has been to print more money, but is there another way of fixing our economy? Would the financial system be more stable if each pound, dollar or euro in our pocket was once again backed by gold?
And they go on to provide the answer given to them by Detlev Schlichter: yes.
All of which confirms the Austrianism as Number 2 meme.
LATER: More incoming from the Cobden Centre flagging up this programme, the first part (of two) of which will be shown at 9pm on Channel 4 this evening. Various Cobdenites contribute. Plus, see also this.
“We’d rather like people not to live on flood plains. Because, you know, their existence is evidence that that’s where it floods sometimes. Not being able to insure your house against floods if you live on a flood plain is what is known, in technical language, as a “fucking clue” that perhaps you shouldn’t be living there. Surely to God at least one person in government knows someone at Lloyds of London?”
– Tim Worstall. I love it when he gets justifiably riled.
Enough diagnosis. What is the cure? A change of personnel will not do it. The search for chief executives who are not motivated by greed and for regulators who are sufficiently god-like to know how to design rules that cannot be gamed will never succeed. The truth is, the financial system, like the whole of human society, was not designed in the first place; it evolved. And the answer is to allow a better one to evolve.
– Matt Ridley
Do not grip fireworks with your buttocks.
– The final entry in David Thompson’s most recent batch of Friday Ephemera, with a link to the video that will convince you of the wisdom of this advice, in the unlikely event that you are not convinced of this already.
The EU is a Seventies solution to a Fifties problem
– Nigel Farage
“The assumption of natural rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence can be summed up by the following proposition: “first comes rights, then comes government.” According to this view: (1) the rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but preexist its formation; (2) The protection of these rights is the first duty of government; and (3) Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights — or its systematic violation of rights — can justify its alteration or abolition; (4) At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so. This is powerful stuff.”
– Randy Barnett.
This inscription is carved onto the Memorial to those who died serving in Bomber Command during World War II.
The memorial was unveiled by the Queen just under a week ago, on June 28th. It is at Hyde Park Corner, in London, at the western end of Green Park. I photographed it this afternoon.
I live close to one of the great old cities of Britain, Newcastle upon Tyne. In two centuries it has been transformed from a hive of enterprise and local pride, based on locally generated and controlled capital and local mutual institutions of community, into the satrapy of an all-powerful state, its industries controlled from London or abroad (thanks to the collectivization of people’s savings through tax relief for pension funds), and its government an impersonal series of agencies staffed by rotating officials from elsewhere whose main job is to secure grants from London. Such local democracy as remains is itself based entirely on power, not trust. In two centuries the great traditions of trust, mutuality and reciprocity on which such cities were based have been all but destroyed – by governments of both stripes. They took centuries to build. The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, in whose magnificent library I researched some of this book, is but a reminder of the days when the great inventors and thinkers of the region, almost all of them self-made men, were its ambitious luminaries. The city is now notorious for shattered, impersonal neighbourhoods where violence and robbery are so commonplace that enterprise is impossible. Materially, everybody in the city is better off than a century ago, but that is the result of new technology, not government. Socially, the deterioration is marked. Hobbes lives, and I blame too much government, not too little.
– A paragraph near the end (pp. 264-5) of The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. Time was when the best popularisers of science were left wingers, and they bolted left wing conclusions onto the end of their popularisations. Ridley does a similar thing there, but in the service of capitalism, progress and freedom.
Ridley is a terrific writer, and there are dozens of quotes scattered through this book which I could have chosen for the SQotD treatment.
It’s not capitalism when private individuals stand to gain from their actions but the taxpayer carries the risk. When risks are socialised and potential profits huge, individuals are bound to be reckless: why be responsible? It’s no good agonising about the culture of banking without considering the astronomical moral hazard endemic in the system today. Of course people who do not have to bear the negative consequences of their actions behave badly.
– Steve Baker MP
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.
– P. J. O’Rourke
To hire an opinion pollster as a strategist is to put a spinning weathervane where a compass needle ought to be
– Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
Now where did I see the leader of this dismal crew described as a weathervane before back in 2007?
I just read this piece by Jeff Carter about how Germany is doing all the productive work for the entire EU. This bit in particular:
If I am the Germans I feel like the weightlifter on the bench press that just had a couple of manhole covers added to the bar. How can you have a European Union, when only one country in Europe is productive? Socialism is like that. They direct and regulate, you produce.
Which made me say to myself the phrase “Germany shrugs”. Which I then googled, and I got to this by Andrew Lawford:
Some time ago, I read an interesting article that outlined the fact that a Greek exit from the Euro would compound its problems in that it would have a new currency that would devalue markedly against the Euro, but would have all its debt still denominated in Euro. Obviously the situation would be resolved either by passing a law that redenominated all Greek debt into the new currency, or simply by defaulting on the payments of Euro debt. The end result for investors would be much the same.
The interesting thing to consider, though, is if Germany were to quit the Euro. The rule that applies to Greece would presumably apply to Germany too: a new currency would be introduced, but the nation’s debt would still be denominated in Euro. In this case, however, the new currency would presumably appreciate massively against the Euro, thus reducing Germany’s debt burden as measured in its new currency. This begs the question: would Germany redenominate all its Euro debt into its new currency? Certainly this is what investors expect as they push bund yields to record lows during the current “flight to quality”, but upon what basis can such a redenomination be expected?
And he ends by saying:
The Germans may simply shrug.
I am surprised that “Germany shrugs” (most of the google hits had an “off” bolted on to the end followed by whatever it was that Germany was shrugging off) is not a more common phrase. It certainly will be, Real Soon Now. Trouble is, the whole world, including us here, have been wondering for ages when “Germany”, by which I mean the people of Germany rather than their EU District Commissioner rulers, will finally demand that their leaders stop leading them into an economic morass and put their economic interests first.
I’m now inclined to think that I got it right at the end of this, where I said that the EU will only collapse when it has entirely run out of all its money and all its power, and all of it will then collapse.
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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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