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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“So the Games have managed to achieve what even Hitler failed to accomplish with the Blitz: the total evacuation of London’s working population. Well, not quite total. There are plenty of poor devils who are still trying to scratch a living in the wasteland of empty restaurants, shops and streets. The trouble is that the the usual customers – the great mass of people who normally commute into central London every day – have been terrorised into staying away by a hugely successful Transport for London promotional campaign.”
Janet Daley, in the Daily Telegraph.
She writes about how so many Londoners have fled the country. I am one of them. More than 7 months ago, dreading what I feared might be the impact of the Games, I booked two weeks’ holiday in southwestern France, staying in the lovely small town of Marseillan, in the Languedoc region (nearest big city is Montpellier). I am actually doing some work down here although I have handed most responsibility to a colleague. My wife and I are having a great time – the weather is glorious without being raspingly hot; the food is amazing and good value; the locals are very pleasant; and last but not least, there is a most gratifying lack of Brits to remind me of home. I do check in on the internet occasionally, but although this might strike some as unsporting, I just haven’t got the “Olympic bug” at all. Yes, I thought parts of the opening ceremony were fun (glad to see Brunel honoured as the great Victorian civil engineer he was), and thought the James Bond routine was hilarious, and was not even all that annoyed about the National Health Service propaganda. (I thought the bit about the Industrial Revolution was actually not bad – all that celebration of carbon emissions and molten steel! But I am just not all that enthused. The greatest sporting festival this year has come and gone (the European football championships), and the Tour de France was also a gloriously unexpected highlight of the year. And as Brian says, there was also the cricket. Always the cricket.
By the way, Bradley Wiggins, winner of the Tour, cycled past where I am now staying, and the locals worship the guy. He has become a bit of a cult in France. They like his character, guts and behaviour.
My blogging output is going to be light for the next 10 days. You see, they sell cheap but excellent red wine here by the litre.
The conviction of Paul Chambers for making an obvious joke on Twitter about blowing an airport sky high has been quashed in the High Court.
So someone in the justice system has a brain cell to call his own. Pity the case had to get as far as the Lord Chief Justice, the aptly named Lord Judge in the job he was born for, before that person was found.
Tell you what is “clearly menacing”, though, if the future of liberty in this country means anything to you at all. The airport security manager who finked on Chambers to the police, the police who arrested him, the Crown Prosecution Service lawyers who prosecuted him, the magistrate who first convicted him, and Judge Jacqueline Davis who refused his initial appeal all still have their heads attached to their necks.
I jest.
Probably.
Incoming from Michael J, drawing my attention to this video of the Mayor of London flagging up the Olympic Games in appropriately manic style, minus a great deal of piss that has been edited out of him, so to speak. The official grand opening is tomorrow.
Right at the end, in the one bit of Not Boris, someone shouts: “I hate Sebastian Coe!” This, if I am not mistaken, was Jeremy Paxman. I did not know he felt that way about Coe. (LATER: He doesn’t. Or not publicly. Not Paxman. See first comment.)
This sort of thing is the twenty first century’s version of pelting those who consider themselves Great and Good with vegetables.
Enjoy.
More on Boris Johnson here: here and here.
The stifling impact of being run by so-called “moderates” continues. On the BBC TV this morning, the programme is leading with the fact that a government finance minister, some hopefully soon-to-be-gone creature called David Gauke, is attacking people who have ever paid a builder, plumber or garage mechanic in cash so as to avoid paying VAT. Mr Gauke told his TV interloctor, in words that may haunt him, that he has never done any such a naughty thing, oh no.
The context for this is that the UK government has recently announced a campaign against what it defines, with worrying vagueness, as “aggressive avoidance” schemes. Not just “avoidance”, which is what happens if you hold a tax-advantaged fund such as a Self Invested Personal Pension, or if you do not smoke (avoiding tobacco duty), or don’t drive (avoiding petrol tax) or drink (etc). No, “bad avoidance” is if you structure your financial affairs in such a way as to pay as little tax as you can do so without actively defrauding anyone. An interesting notion. As we know, the UK comedian Jimmy Carr was recently hit by exposure of his tax-planning, and other celebs and sports folk have sometimes got into similar sorts of arrangements.
In as much as governments need to exist at all – and I am not an anarchist – there is a legitimate argument about the least-bad way to do this, and the simpler and flatter the tax regime is, the better. A huge chunk of this tax planning industry from which people like Jimmy Carr make use would vanish in a puff of smoke if our system was overhauled on the sort of lines recently proposed by the 2020 Tax Commission.
The trouble with the stance taken by Mr Gauke is that he presumes that there is some correct chunk of our wealth to which the State has presumed to take a share, and that any action we take to avoid tax might increase the tax burden paid by our fellow citizens. But what this man seems to ignore is, a), that an economy is not a static pie where my action must negatively affect someone else (that old zero-sum problem again), but an economy is something can grow through mutually beneficial trade, and that that, b), in a tolerably free society, the level of tax that citizens will pay has its limits, even if people don’t go in for some of the more artificial wealth structures to minimise tax (bearing in mind that it costs money to get an accountant/lawyer to set these schemes up).
Also, suppose that, instead of getting a builder into do a bit of work for cash to smarten up my flat or tackle an issue, I try and get a mate around to do the job for me in return for buying him a nice bottle of wine or editing some material for him/her? Is this not also wrong in the eyes of Mr Gauke? I guess it is. Even before I have done anything, the State is saying: “I want a piece of whatever action you engage in”. Taken to extremes, this penalises work over leisure. It is not surprising what the results are.
At root, this is a matter of basic political philosophy. In the main (there are exceptions), the current Conservative Party and its Liberal Democrat coalition partners subscribe to a deeply paternalistic, communitarian outlook of the sort that Barack Obama, in his recent communitarian-leaning “you did not build that” speech, could identify with. This is also a sign of how under Cameron, the Tory party has reverted to the older, more trade-disdaining traditions of old and away from its Thatcherite strains. How’s that working out for us?
People who make a living by getting paid in cash to fix windows, respray cars or mend pipes are not an evil. In the vast majority of cases, they are doing something about which someone like David Gauke, David Cameron or Barack Obama have been ignorant of all their lives: earning a living, and providing people with goods and services in a free market. They might as well try and understand life on Mars. It is shame we can’t send them there.
Update: The Daily Telegraph weighs in. It is not impressed by Gauke.
It is inevitable. The day after Bradley Wiggins (about whom Patrick Crozier wrote here) rode to victory in the Tour de France, becoming the first British winner of this famously brutal event, London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, took hold of this feat, and the upcoming Olympics, to make some points about what might appear to be a very different issue: the UK economy:
“As you listen, you realise that these performances were the result not just of physical genius, but also of colossal intellectual and emotional effort — years of self-discipline. The Olympics, in other words, is about character. It’s about the will. Of course, as Baron de Coubertin was at pains to point out, it is not all about winning. But if you want to win, then you need to work. That is the basic message of the Olympics.”
There is a problem here. Sport – so long as it does not involve cheating the rules (key qualification) is a strict meritocracy, and effort and reward hopefully are closely aligned, although that doesn’t allow for the blessings of inborn physical and mental capabilities, nor that of simple luck. There is, in my view, a danger in supposing that the qualities that are good in sport can be easily carried across into other fields. One thing that Boris J. probably understands better than some of his fellow Conservatives is that with sport, it is, at least as far as competitors are concerned, zero sum. If Bradley Wiggins wins the Tour, that means someone else doesn’t, and so on. It is not of course zero sum for the spectators and fans who get a vicarious sense of enjoyment from watching it all. But in a free economy, there is a positive-sum game: everyone “wins” as the economic pie expands as more efficient and effective ways of delivering goods and services are arrived at. And to do that, requires, not some sort of endless preaching about the need for hard work and conquest of pain, but about allowing free men and women to interact how they want, subject to as few impediments as possible from the State.
The late Robert Nozick once criticized the notion that inheritance of wealth is unfair by pointing to how people who say this often liken their ideal society to a sort of athletics race, where there is a track of fixed length, a fixed starting point and end, and a set quantity of runners seeking to acquire a pre-determined prize. A free, open society is very different. It is, as he said in Anarchy, State and Utopia, about people exchanging different things with one another without worrying about any set starting point or finishing line.
Like Boris Johnson, I agree we can and should be inspired by the courage and determination of people such as Bradley Wiggins and other athletes. Let’s not, however, confuse a sadistic 3-week peloton through the French countryside with what needs to happen to revive an over-regulated and over-taxed economy.
In the meantime, well done to Wiggins. Fantastic achievement, and he appears to be a likeable bloke as well. I hope he can cope with some of the fame and hangers-on who will be attracted to his presumed new wealth.
One of the few policy areas where the current British government at least appears to be making some headway is education. Here is an article by Toby Young, describing what he confidently believes is such progress, and I hope he is right. (Earlier thoughts by me here about Toby Young’s educational ideas and efforts here.)
Whether, in the longer run, these new free schools will go anywhere especially good remains to be seen. Two thoughts about them occur to me.
First, the customer is still, at least partly, the government. Government money follows the choices of parents. But what if a future government, rather than going to the bother of totally shutting down such schools, started instead following its own money and demanding all kinds of relatively subtle changes and impositions, with a view to grinding them down a little less publicly, and then blaming them for the failure that was inflicted upon them? That’s not at all hard to imagine.
When truly free markets start, they often do so in a very muddled way. Only when the worst of the muddle is sorted does progress then get seriously under way. When, on the other hand, there is immediate improvement, of the sort that Toby Young describes in his article, that can mean merely that government employees have been replaced with other government employees. At first, the new government employees do a better job. Later, progress falters, and eventually things start getting worse, again. The best public bid becomes replaced by the most enticing private bid, made covertly to the politicians. There’s been a lot of that lately.
It is tempting for right wingers to assume that, merely because the slighted government employees – in this case the old school unionised state teachers – are angry about having their monopoly snatched away from them, that the new approach must necessarily be a wholly good thing. Sadly, it does not follow.
My second thought concerns the rules that these new free schools must follow. My question is: Are they allowed to threaten expulsion to pupils they decide they don’t want to keep? I can find no answer in Young’s piece, but suspect that they probably can. If that’s right, then that really is a huge step in the right direction, towards freedom of association.
That may sound an unnecessarily depressing, even belligerent, way to talk. But in schools, in my limited but still very real and quite recent experience, the right to expel is the biggest single difference between success and failure.
Paradoxically, if you can expel, you very seldom actually want to, because the mere hint of the threat solves your problem. But if you cannot expel, you cannot threaten it either, and problems then multiply. Add that to the fact that, quite properly, you also cannot threaten tortures of the sort that used to be routine in schools but which are now frowned upon (like severe beatings or solitary confinement or compulsory hard labour), and the school has literally no power over its pupils, other than its power to amuse. As soon as those pupils work that out, the ones who prefer mayhem to learning or even to being otherwise entertained become the rulers of the place. There is simply no way to control them. At that point, just about everyone involved wants out of there.
I have personally witnessed this kind of thing, when doing various stints of volunteer teaching. The problem was not the age of the pupils or the incompetence of the teachers. In other circumstances the same pupils would have behaved fine, and in other institutions the teachers would have done fine work, a fact that many failing teachers act upon, thereby becoming successful something elses. The problem was the rules.
If Toby Young’s school is obliged to go on attempting to educate whichever pupils they are at first happy to welcome but later wish they hadn’t, then look out Toby Young. Trouble. Just as corruption and monopolised failure takes a bit of time to organise, so too does it take time for pupils in a place like Tony Young’s school to work out that the people bossing them around are actually defenceless against determined rebellion, if that is the situation. But if that is the situation, the pupils will work it out, and that will have consequences, of the sort that Toby Young will not like at all.
If, on the other hand, Toby Young and his comrades can simply say to such potential rebels: “Our gaff – our rules – break our rules and ignore all warnings, and you’re out”, then the problem won’t even arise, because the mere hint of expulsion will end such problems at once.
Expulsion is the opposite side of the coin to the right to leave, the coin being (see above) freedom of association. Freedom of association is, I think, one of humanity’s very best ideas. If all those present in some institution prefer, however grudgingly, being there to not being there, and if everyone there is tolerated, however grudgingly, by everyone else, then everything just works so much better. There may be lots of other problems, but tackling them becomes so much easier if all those who don’t even want to solve those problems can be told to get the hell out of there, or can just get the hell out anyway.
“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.
Ed West wrote a short but odd article about The Shard in the Telegraph:
Being a patriot, and a massive sexual inadequate, I should be pleased that Britain now has the tallest, most dominant, thrusting skyscraper in the whole of Europe. […] Why is it that with the exception of the US, which has very high inequality levels, all the other monster buildings are in tyrannies ruled by oil sheikhs or politburos? What does it say about Britain that we’re now part of this group?
It says nothing whatsoever. And I suspect Ed West cannot glean the future from tea leaves either. Why does he persist in looking for meaning where there is none?
That he sees it as a “middle finger” says nothing about the Shard but it tells us quite a lot about Ed West.
Strangely for a self-styled “patriot”, he uses many Americanisms, such as the middle finger as his rude gesture of choice rather than the English ‘mighty forks’…
…and when he says “kids” he means children rather than baby goats, also an Americanism…
He is however very English in his use of defensive self-deprecation. And he sees the success of others as somehow diminishing himself and in that way at least he is really very English indeed (he presumably holds with the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy)… but as he seems motived by envy, perhaps describing himself as a sexual inadequate was not ‘defensive self-deprecation’ after all.
“In order to punish Barclays further, they should have to start life again as a third division Scottish football club.”
Mark Littlewood, boss of the Institute of Economic Affairs, in a private communication via Facebook. It is so good that I don’t think he’ll mind me quoting him here.
He is talking about the resignation, announced today, of Bob Diamond as CEO of Barclays. That bank has been fined a total of £290 million by US and UK authorities for manipulating the inter-bank interest rates known as LIBOR. Criminal prosecutions are high possible and the net could widen very far indeed.
Barclays is one of those UK banks – HSBC being the other big high street one – that did not receive, nor ask for, bailouts by the UK taxpayer. However, that bank, like all the rest, did benefit from the privilege of being able to get access to cheap Bank of England funding; and it also benefited from state-backed guarantees. The point cannot be made too often: we don’t have a proper capitalist banking system but at best a hybrid. But it also needs to be recognised that even in a world of total laissez faire and no funny fiat money, there might still be market conventions for setting a benchmark reference rate for interest rates between banks, just as there is a daily “fix” for the gold price in the London spot gold market. Such market benchmarks arise, like a sort of Hayekian spontaneous order, because they are useful for other economic actors in pricing products of their own.
However, when a bank or other institution fiddles the prices submitted for these benchmarks, it erodes confidence in the system and the reputation of the miscreant will be badly damaged. In a crude sort of way, what has happened is a good sign that organisations which screw up suffer.
Update: Guido Fawkes weighs in, and points out that the manipulation of interest rates has also been government policy for years.
North Wales Police have issued a (probably illegal) “dispersal order” banning unaccompanied teenagers from Bangor in the evenings. They say it is not a blanket ban. The words of the order say it is.
Ellie May O’Hagan opposes it because it makes teenagers feel bad, and because it would have made her feel bad when she was a teenager:
For the 13-year-old me, a curfew would have meant more isolation, more casting adrift, a stronger sense that the town in which I lived didn’t really care about my place in it. I might have felt frustrated that a lack of youth services forced me on to the street, and then that my presence there automatically made me deviant. Then I might have decided not to care about a city that didn’t care about me.
Keith Towler, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales opposes it because it makes people have bad feelings towards teenagers:
“It demonises under 16s, isolates them from their communities, alienates them from police and spreads the misconception all young people are troublemakers.”
There is talk of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission opposing it because it is discrimination. At least they won’t have far to toddle. The EHRC has an office in Bangor.
I am glad all these worthies and unworthies oppose the curfew. It needs opposing. But it saddens me that nobody opposes it on the grounds of how dare they. How dare they stop people who have committed no crime from walking or standing in the public street? In the case of a shopping centre or a nightclub I vehemently support the right of the proprietors to exclude whomsoever they wish. I also support, if more cautiously, the right of small areas to set local rules and covenants as to whether alcohol is permitted, rules about noise and similar constraints. But North Wales Police have exactly as much a right to expel teenagers from a public space as North Wales teenagers have a right to expel the police.
Bob Neill MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government, has written to all local authority leaders.
Yes, I know, be still my beating heart, a post about local government. I will try to keep it brief and malicious, like Bob Neill’s letter.
Remember how John Prescott’s Standards Board for England curbed freedom of speech for local councillors under the guise of “standards”?
Remember how its supposedly reformed local sucessors demanded that councillors “show respect and consideration for others”? This meant, for example, that John Dixon, a Cardiff councillor visiting London who tweeted while passing the Scientologist church in Tottenham Court Road that he just hurried past “in case the stupid rubs off” was reported to the local Standards Board. He was cleared, but as so often, and as the Scientologist who reported him knew very well, the process is the punishment.
Well, the local Standards Boards have in their turn been abolished and new rules come in tomorrow. I have not studied them in detail and am slightly less likely to do so than to gnaw off my own legs. They will probably go bad in their turn. The new rules, not my legs. But just for today, I find myself happy about this part of Bob Neill’s letter:
However, given the importance that the new arrangements are, and are clearly perceived to be, a wholly fresh start we are minded to make further provision so that any former member of a standards committee appointed under the transitional arrangements as an independent person can hold that office only until 30 June 2013.
So we bid farewell today to some quangocrats. And just for once the revolving door that smoothly glides in front of such people as it leads them from one sinecure to the next has stuck.
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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