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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“Obama also wishes us to believe that, because successful producers learned something from government teachers, used government roads and bridges, employed government research, and the like, this means they don’t really own their success or wealth. Rational Americans know full well that the government funds such things by forcibly confiscating the wealth of producers. Rational Americans also know that a bum is as free to use a government bridge as is a successful business owner, but the business owner chose to apply his intelligence and work hard to build something great.”
– Craig Biddle.
In some ways, Obama’s assertion that we don’t really deserve credit for, or earn, what we produce because of such factors is a bit like the idea that the guard-dog that protects our house owns it, not the owner. I get the impression that Obama’s comments are causing him quite a lot of damage, and I hope he continues to be pounded for them.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
– T. E. Lawrence
Quoted – I kid you not – near the end of this video interview by South African cricketer A. B. de Villiers. The three match series between England and South Africa, featuring six of the world’s top ten Test bowlers and eight of the top seventeen Test batsmen and which will will decide which team is ranked No 1 in the world, begins today at the Oval.
“It is the job of economists to point out trade-offs; it is the job of politicians and planners to deny that trade-offs exist.”
– William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, page 256.
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
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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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