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]
|
“Here the most fundamental relevant principle is the one discovered by Bastiat: economic value lies in service; an economic exchange is an exchange of services, each valued more highly by its beneficiary than the alternative situation in which the service is not performed. We are accustomed to talking about “goods and services”, of course. But the distinction, while perfectly all right in its place, does not reflect anything fundamental – rather, it obscures what is fundamental. When A buys some object, x, from B, what he gets from B is the right to use x. That is what it is to “have” x, in normative terms.”
Jan Narveson. His essay – which touches on an old bugbear of mine (!) – nicely slices through the fallacies that people engage in when they disparage services as opposed to manufacturing or other, more supposedly “real” kinds of wealth, as happened on the thread in this article.
I was in a (US) bookstore when a group of young Chinese (15 – 25 years, I’d guess) tourist/students entered. While I was there, they bought a stack of Dalai Lama books, saying they were not available in China. They also bought several recent histories on China, saying that they liked to be able to compare with the histories they got in China, to keep track of what the government was changing/denying. Additionally, they said they were getting in less sight-seeing than they had planned, as they were enjoying the web w/o government filters, especially on searches.
There are a lot of implications there.
– commenter “J2” on this
“Had McQueen’s life been recorded in a measured and appropriate way, it would have retained some dignity. As it is, we’ve had to consider the silhouette of trousers as though it ranks with the irrigation of Sudan or a cure for cancer. And that just makes him look a complete prat.”
George Pitcher, writing about the fashion industry in the light of the death of 40-year-old designer Alexander McQueen. Much of what Mr Pitcher writes in this piece also applies, in my view, to parts of the architecture and “modern” art establishment. However, at least the fashion industry operates mostly in a free(ish) market. If we don’t like its products, then we don’t have to buy them. When a tax-funded body pays for some freakish statue, for example, it is not quite the same thing.
“The fluffy stuff you put in your roof for rats to urinate on.”
– Matthew Paris quotes Australian Shadow Finance Minister Barnaby Joyce‘s description of loft insulation. Paris says that politics throughout the West is moving towards the uncouth right. Mr Turnbull’s fate has made him, he says, “shudder”.
“In short, sterling is in the toilet, our pensions have been slaughtered, cash savings yield almost nothing, the country is up to its neck in unprecedented debt, the banking system is awash with funny money, our gold reserves were sold off at rock-bottom prices, and Britain’s dole queue is considerably longer than before Crash Gordon began cooking the books. Apart from that, it’s not too bad.”
Jeff Randall.
Even now, after thinking through all the various words written about the plodding disaster of a man that Brown is, it is shocking to contemplate the damage he has done and continues to do, as he heads towards oblivion.
“Climategate is like the finest single malt whisky – 30-years matured, complex and multi-layered, distilled to a fiery concentration, and every drop of the cask to be savoured in small, delicious, damn-the-prohibitionist sips.”
– From regular Samizdata commenter, Pa Annoyed, writing about this recent post of Brian Micklethwait.
“Churchill, who was prone to the black dog of depression, went to bed on the night of the 5th of June 1944 with a heavy heart. Gloomily he told his wife, Clementine, that by the time they awoke in the morning many tens of thousands of young men he had sent across the Channel might lie dead on the beaches of Normandy. In Alanbrooke’s diaries (he was the finest of the WWII diarists) it is clear how heavily he felt the weight of responsibility throughout his time as a commander in France in 1940, and subsequently as CIGS. Yet neither Alanbrooke nor Churchill felt the need to go in front of the cameras and explain how troubled they were by all the pressure. Even long afterwards it wouldn’t have occurred to either for a split second that this would be a good idea or remotely appropriate.”
– Iain Martin, commenting on the recent performance of Mr Blair’s former spinmeister on the TV. He makes a good point, I think.
“When I hear the word “holistic” I reach for my BAR and don’t worry about the safety.”
– Regular Samizdata commenter NickM, over at his CountingCats redoubt. He’s talking about Prince Charles. Of course, if Charles wants to revert to an age of Divine Right, witchburnings, absence of notions of individual rights, logic, science and so forth, then maybe he should remove himself to a place more congenial to his outlook.
Ballet by elephants.
– Mike Carlson, commentating for BBC1 TV during the first quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, describes the Indianapolis Colts offence as they run in the first touchdown. 10-0 Colts at the end of the first quarter.
A North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.
– Christopher Hitchens writes about A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Given that we think, as most of us seem to do, that the production of such goods as cars, vacuum cleaners, and frozen vegetables should take place in a regime of market competition, why do so many among us nevertheless agree that it makes sense to exclude the production of money from these same forces? Why must the production of money be entrusted to a monopoly called the central bank?
– My thanks to Jerzy Strzelecki for drawing my attention to this mises.org piece by him, written when the recent banking tumult was at its most tumultuous, entitled The School of Salamanca Saw This Coming. Quite brief and well worth a read. You don’t have to believe in God to understand phrases like “usurpations of God’s knowledge”.
“When one studies the history of money one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.”
F.A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined. Page 33. Published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The book is quite challenging and complex in some of its arguments, but I find the broad thrust of it – that competition is good for currencies as it is for other aspects of economic life, to be unanswerable.
|
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.
|
