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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“All corporate taxes fall on households in the end. Companies might be convenient places to get cash from but they are not the people actually carrying the economic burden. It is some combination of shareholders, workers and consumers that are carrying the burden: those getting the social services which they are unable to fund.”
– Tim Worstall, dealing with yet another piece of nonsense from that over-blown socialist buffoon, Richard Murphy. I have to admire Tim’s stamina in how he relentlessly mocks and refutes the rubbish from Murphy. But someone has to do it.
So all the UK is isolated from is an impending disaster: the eurozone will fragment with countries leaving and debt defaults. It is like being as isolated as a man who failed to get onto the Titanic before it sailed.
– Terry Smith
By the end, we may see profligate politicians hanging from lampposts. But there’ll be a lot of bad stuff, too.
– Instapundit
LATER:
But all joking aside, if the current profligacy continues, and America winds up in a Greece-style (or worse) collapse, politicians may not wind up hanging from lampposts (we don’t really do that here), but they will at the very least likely face the kind of investigations, prosecutions, and social opprobrium normally reserved for child molesters and Bernie Madoff types. I don’t think they fully appreciate that. If they did, they’d be acting differently.
I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion – that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many persons place themselves above mankind, to rule and patronize it; too many persons make a trade of looking after it. It will be answered – “You yourself are occupied upon it all this time.” Very true. But it must be admitted that it is in another sense entirely that I am speaking; and if I join the reformers it is solely for the purpose of inducing them to relax their hold.
– from The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (on the penultimate page (54) of this pdf edition)
Ah yes. To fight politics, you have to do politics. And before you know it, you are what you were earlier warning the world against.
Listening to Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is like drinking champagne with God.
– HC Robbins Landon
Quoted on BBC Radio 3 today, by music scholar Lionel Sawkins, in a programme about Le Concert Spirituel, which seems to have been an eighteenth century French version of the Proms. Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater was the single most popular piece played at these concerts.
Unless, of course, you are saying that people can freely come to these islands providing they are not ill, don’t ever require homes or need education then it is fine because these services are not benefits.
Pretty much, yes. I think that people should be able to freely come to these islands to earn a living, and then should be required to pay for their own housing, schooling, and healthcare in the free market when they need it. As should the natively born. The government spends huge sums of money on these things, and all three of them are worse in quality for almost everybody than they would be if the government did not spend any of this money.
– Michael Jennings, spelling out exactly what folks in these here parts most certainly do think.
“Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?” said Wilfred.
“ffinch-ffarrowmere,” corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.
– from the short story Meet Mr. Mulliner by P. G. Wodehouse, quoted by Stephen Fry, in an essay by him about Wodehouse published by the Independent in 2000.
Paul Krugman:
“Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending in Europe as a whole.”
Let us fisk this:
“The story so far: In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, Europe, like America, had a runaway banking system and a rapid buildup of debt. In Europe’s case, however, much of the lending was across borders, as funds from Germany flowed into southern Europe. This lending was perceived as low risk. Hey, the recipients were all on the euro, so what could go wrong?”
Nice piece of snark, which I do not demur from.
“For the most part, by the way, this lending went to the private sector, not to governments. Only Greece ran large budget deficits during the good years; Spain actually had a surplus on the eve of the crisis.”
That may be true. I have not checked. However, the fact that Spain’s public finances went down the toilet so fast does not quite suggest that the Spanish public sector was a model of mean-minded prudence.
“Then the bubble burst. Private spending in the debtor nations fell sharply. And the question European leaders should have been asking was how to keep those spending cuts from causing a Europe-wide downturn.”
No, they should have been facing up to the fact that a vast number of mal-investments were caused by a decade of under-priced credit, and that there was no way that such a build-up of bad investments can be unwound painlessly. Seeking to hold off the pain by increasing public spending (and hence scaring the hell out of the global bond market) is hardly likely to achieve the desired effect.
“During the years of easy money, wages and prices in southern Europe rose substantially faster than in northern Europe. This divergence now needs to be reversed, either through falling prices in the south or through rising prices in the north. And it matters which: If southern Europe is forced to deflate its way to competitiveness, it will both pay a heavy price in employment and worsen its debt problems. The chances of success would be much greater if the gap were closed via rising prices in the north.”
That may be true in crudely political terms; after having enjoyed the fat years, those who have done so are not likely to enjoy a lean period. However…
“But to close the gap through rising prices in the north, policy makers would have to accept temporarily higher inflation for the euro area as a whole. And they’ve made it clear that they won’t. Last April, in fact, the European Central Bank began raising interest rates, even though it was obvious to most observers that underlying inflation was, if anything, too low.”
Well, it seems a bit glib to assume, as Keynesians like Professor Krugman do, that the inflation will prove to be temporary… Riiiight… One key problem for the eurozone, as he ought to know, is that labour markets in much of the region are so heavily regulated that getting a meaningful adjustment in wages and prices is hard, and yet this has to happen if countries such as Greece and Germany are to co-exist under the same currency area without strife. The same issue, of course, would apply if the whole region were to adopt, say, an inelastic system of real money instead of fiat money issued by a central bank or banks.
Another point for Professor Krugman to remember is that in some member nations, such as France, there has been double-digit percent unemployment for the young long before anyone had heard about sub-prime or credit crunches. And Europe’s record for wealth and job creation, compared to that of the US prior to the crunch, has been and remains lamentable.
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ‘there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: ‘Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’
Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.
In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’
This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate. As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt. It seems that the 2.3mm rise rate has been based on just one tide gauge in Hong Kong (whose record is contradicted by four other nearby tide gauges). Why does it show such a rise? Because like many of the 159 tide gauge stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is sited on an unstable harbour construction or landing pier prone to uplift or subsidence. When you exclude these unreliable stations, the 68 remaining ones give a present rate of sea level rise in the order of 1mm a year.
If the ice caps are melting, it is at such a small rate globally that we can hardly see its effects on sea level. I certainly have not been able to find any evidence for it. The sea level rise today is at most 0.7mm a year — though, probably, much smaller.
We must learn to take the environmentalists’ predictions with a huge pinch of salt. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year: where are those refugees? And where are those sea level rises? The true facts are found by observing and measuring nature itself, not in the IPCC’s computer-generated projections. There are many urgent natural problems to consider on Planet Earth — tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions not least among them. But the threat of rising sea levels is an artificial crisis.
– Sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner rips into the climate catastrophists.
See also this piece, which drives a dagger into the heart of the climate catastrophe fraud.
““Green” will never be quite the same after Obama. When Solyndra and its affiliated scandals are at last fully brought into the light of day, we will see the logical reification of Climategate I & II, Al Gore’s hucksterism, and Van Jones’s lunacy. How ironic that the more Obama tried to stop drilling in the West, offshore, and in Alaska, as well as stopping the Canadian pipeline, the more the American private sector kept finding oil and gas despite rather than because of the U.S. government. How further ironic that the one area that Obama felt was unnecessary for, or indeed antithetical to, America’s economic recovery — vast new gas and oil finds — will soon turn out to be America’s greatest boon in the last 20 years. While Obama and Energy Secretary Chu still insist on subsidizing money-losing wind and solar concerns, we are in the midst of a revolution that, within 20 years, will reduce or even end the trade deficit, help pay off the national debt, create millions of new jobs, and turn the Western Hemisphere into the new Persian Gulf. The American petroleum revolution can be delayed by Obama, but it cannot be stopped.”
– Victor Davis Hanson.
In nine tenths of the written treaties between the Kings of Portugal and the various reigning Princes of Hindustan, the matter of pepper came up in the first clause.
– Admiral Ballard
I have been reading The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogerson. Like many books it has apposite quotations at the start of each chapter, of which the above quotation was by some distance my favourite one. The Ballard quoted is presumably the Ballard who wrote this book, who was indeed an admiral as well as a historian.
The concept of property is fundamental to our society, probably to any workable society. Operationally, it is understood by every child above the age of three. Intellectually, it is understood by almost no one.
Consider the slogan “property rights vs. human rights.” Its rhetorical force comes from the implication that property rights are the rights of property and human rights the rights of humans; humans are more important than property (chairs, tables, and the like); consequently, human rights take precedence over property rights.
But property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans with regard to property.
– from The Machinery of Freedom (1973) by David Friedman, Part 1, “In defense of property”.
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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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