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How about adding some math lessons to plot statistically the chance of an Arab suicide bomber and a gay socialist vegetarian pacifist wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt and no sense of irony all ending up on the same bus in London? Sigh…Math was never that much fun in my school days. State education is beyond parody. – Perry de Havilland commenting here January 23rd, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Nolte, at the Big Hollywood blog. I think he has a strong point in his praise of Ricky Gervais’s performance, but I have a slight reservation. Imagine if Gervais had said such insulting things about showbiz people that Mr Nolte holds dear, or causes he supports. I doubt we would get such applause. And I also note that in the Daily Mail newspaper yesterday (I quote from reading the print edition), the writer, Quentin Letts, raves on about Gervais’s rudeness as if it was a barnstorming example of high wit. No it wasn’t. I cannot imagine your average Daily Mail reader enjoying say, an attack by an American comedian on the Royal family, for example. The sad truth is that yes, Hollywood is full of self-regarding jerks who deserve all they get. But that does not make gratuitous rudeness somehow clever, as far as I can see, and I don’t see how we are going to get better movies as a result. And this does all rather cement the idea in American’s minds that many Brits are little more than hooligans. (I’d like to know what Stateside commenters think of how this all comes across.) Talking of good movies, has anyone yet seen The King’s Speech? January 19th, 2011 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
“So 2011 is the year of the “beneficial crisis”, when the EU will try to exploit short-term economic hardship in order to eliminate the powers of national governments and to create a new pan-European political structure. If it succeeds, it may go on to become a great world power. If it fails, it will start to revert to a collection of nation states.” He makes a persuasive argument that as far as the architects of the EU superstate were concerned, the sort of crises we are living through – such as the Irish/Greek debt problems – are not problems for the eurozone, they are actually very useful stepping stones towards creating their own new version of the Holy Roman Empire, except that unlike the HRE, the new state will be one run on corporatist, heavily regulated, lines. January 14th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I know, my friends, that you are concerned about corporate power. So am I. So are many of my free-market economist colleagues. We simply believe, and we think history is on our side, that the best check against corporate power is the competitve marketplace and the power of the consumer dollar (framed, of course, by legal prohibitions on force and fraud). Competition plays mean, nasty corporations off against each other in a contest to serve us. Yes, they still have power, but its negative effects are lessened. It is when corporations can use the state to rig the rules in their favor that the negative effects of their power become magnified, precisely because it has the force of the state behind it. The current mess shows this as well as anything ever has, once you realize just what a large role the state played. If you really want to reduce the power of corporations, don’t give them access to the state by expanding the state’s regulatory powers. That’s precisely what they want, as the current battle over the $700 billion booty amply demonstrates. This is why so many of us committed to free markets oppose the bailout. It is yet another example of the long history of the private sector attempting to enrich itself via the state. When it does so, there are no benefits to the rest of us, unlike what happens when firms try to get rich in a competitive market. Moreover, these same firms benefited enormously from the regulatory interventions they supported and that harmed so many of us. The eventual bursting of the bubble and their subsequent losses are, to many of us, their just desserts for rigging the game and eventually getting caught. To reward them again for their rigging of the game is not just morally unconscionable, it is very bad econonmic policy, given that it sends a message to other would-be riggers that they too will get rewarded for wreaking havoc on the US economy. There will be short-term pain if we don’t bailout these firms, but that is the hangover price we pay for 15 years or more of binge lending. The proposed bailout cannot prevent the pain of the hangover; it can only conceal it by shifting and dispersing it among the taxpayers and an economy weakened by the borrowing, taxing, and/or inflation needed to pay for that $700 billion. Better we should take our short-term pain straight up and clean out the mistakes of our binge and then get back to the business of free markets without creating an unchecked Executive branch monstrosity trying to “save” those who profited most from the binge and harming innocent taxpayers in the process. What I ask of you my friends on the left is to not only continue to work with us to oppose this or any similar bailout, but to consider carefully whether you really want to entrust the same entity who is the predominant cause of this crisis with the power to attempt to cure it. New regulatory powers may look like the solution, but that’s what people said when the CRA was passed, or when Fannie and Freddie were given new mandates. And the very firms who are going to be regulated will be first in line to determine how those regulations get written and enforced. You can bet which way that game is going to get rigged. I know you are tempted to think that the problems with these regulations are the fault of the individuals doing the regulating. If only, you think, Obama can win and we can clean out the corrupt Republicans and put ethical, well-meaning folks in place. Think again. For one thing, almost every government intervention at the root of this crisis took place with a Democratic president or a Democratic-controlled Congress in place. Even when the Republicans controlled Congress, President Clinton worked around it to change the rules to allow Fannie and Freddie into the higher-risk loan market. My point here is not to pin the blame for the current crisis on the Democrats. That blame goes around equally. My point is that hoping that having the “right people” in power will avoid these problems is both naive and historically blind. As much as corporate interests were relevant, they were aided and abetted, if unintentionally, by well-meaning attempts by basically good people to do good things.The problem is that there were a large number of undesirable unintended consequences, most of which were predictable and predicted. It doesn’t matter which party is captaining the ship: regulations come with unintended consequences and will always tend to be captured by the private interests with the most at stake. And history is full of cases where those with a moral or ideological agenda find themselves in political fellowship with those whose material interests are on the line, even if the two groups are usually on opposite sides. – Professor Steven G. Horwitz, writing in late September 2008, in a piece entitled An Open Letter to my Friends on the Left. This evening, Horwitz will be giving a talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, entitled An Austrian Perspective on the Great Recession 2008-2009. January 11th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It might be more appropriate if the Sveriges Riksbank would end the Economics Nobel Prize as a failure: strictly, it isn’t a true Nobel at all; it was not part of Alfred Nobel’s legacy, but a much later add-on to pander to the economics profession’s vain pretensions of scientific respectability. If we judge a science by the hallmark of predictability, then the predictions of economists are no better than those of ancient Roman augurs or modern taxi drivers; alternatively, we can judge by its contribution to “scientific” knowledge, in which case the contribution that modern financial economics has made makes us wonder if the agricultural alchemist Lysenko shouldn’t have got a Nobel himself; or we can judge it by contribution to the welfare of society at large, in which case the undermining of the capitalist system, the repeated disasters of the past 20 years, the immiseration of millions of innocent workers and savers, and the trillion dollar losses of recent years surely speak for themselves.” – Alchemists of Loss – How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System, by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchison. First published in 2010. Page 86. Now having read it, I cannot recommend this book too strongly. Some of the discussion about modern financial theory – and its baleful consequences – is quite complex, but the authors write with a verve and eye for drama that makes this a very readable book. In my view, it is the best study of what has happened, and more importantly, spells out in practical, thoughtful ways as to what should be done. January 10th, 2011 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
If we ever get to the day when the best we can do in the way of eccentrics is men who wear silly hats, then heaven help us. – Simon Heffer, on the late David Hart January 9th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
What depraved individual wants to make it easier for the government to do stuff? The government doing stuff is expensive and hurts freedom, so we should all be trying to make sure it barely ever does anything. Still, there are people out there that hate humanity and want the government constantly doing stuff and spending our money while pushing us around. They must be foiled. – from a posting by Frank J concerning a proposal to make government faster, entitled Making Government Slower. His suggestions follow. January 8th, 2011 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
“What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies – and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis.” I love that final sentence. You do not have to buy into this guy’s Marxian point of view to enjoy his class analysis of what drives part of the Green agenda. I think he has a good point. January 7th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. – wise words from Milton Friedman much quoted of late, e.g. here. January 1st, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Where Tony Blair had no reverse gear, and Lady T was not for turning, Mr Cameron has a full gearbox and power steering that allow him to execute swerves and three point turns. … yet again I find myself pondering adding a “No shit Sherlock” category… maybe more decorously listed as “I told you so” or some such. December 27th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
George Osborne was recently in New York, soaking up plaudits for boldly leading Britain into fiscal austerity at a time when, apparently in contrast, America’s feckless political elite has allowed the national debt to balloon. The problem is that UK austerity, so far at least, is a myth. November’s national accounts, released last week, were shocking. Government spending last month was sharply up on the same month in 2009 – yes, up! British state borrowing is still escalating, with the national debt rising very quickly. However I do rather roll my eyes at the word ‘shocking’ as it has been screamingly obvious what was happening for quite some time. Sometimes I think Samizdata needs a category called ‘No shit, Sherlock’. How anyone could have thought Cameron’s dismal followers were ever serious about actually cutting back the state is hard to fathom. December 26th, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. Thus even though the decision to put the thesis online was Omar’s, we have no choice but to back him. That would hold even if we did not agree with the material! Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent… – Ross Anderson, of the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, defending academic freedom. This makes me proud. December 25th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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