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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From the latest Radio Times:
9.00 Wonderland: My Child the Rioter
Last August’s riots provoked a legal backlash that has seen often lengthy prison sentences handed down to those involved. This documentary enters the homes of the some of the families affected, including that of Eileen and Alan Bretherton whose son Liam recently served in Afghanistan but got caught up in the unrest while home on leave. Now he is an ex-offender with a promising military career in tatters.
“Legal backlash” is, I suppose, one way to describe a severe punishment.
But the phrase that really caught my eye in this was where it says that son Liam got “caught up in” the unrest. You hear this phrase a lot these days, to describe what someone did, in a way that suggests that what he did was really done to him, by a malign outside force. The Unrest, you see, forced him to go out looting. The Unrest called round, knocked on his door, dragged him out into the street and there compelled him to misbehave. Liam didn’t do rioting. The rioting “involved” him. There the Unrest was, catching Liam up in itself. How could Liam himself be held responsible for what Unrest did to him?
Truly, we do live in a Wonderland.
And what of that “legal backlash”? (There goes another phrase which makes a bunch of decisions appear like a mere collective emotional spasm.) Well, next time Unrest decides, for its own inscrutable reasons, to reach out and grab people, more of them will surely decide to resist being caught up in it, now that there has been this legal backlash against the last lot of those picked on by Unrest.
Some Christians I know or read about claim to be concerned about the long-term health of society and the future welfare of generations yet unborn, as well as the current one, and yet all too many of the senior figures in the Church of England, say, make asses of themselves by unthinking repetition of Big Government thinking. Case in point being the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
It is, therefore, a pleasant break from the norm to read this, from Dr Williams’ predecessor, George Carey:
“The sheer scale of our public debt – which hit £1tn yesterday – is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today. If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren.”
(H/T, Suboptimal Planet: a new blog that I thoroughly recommend).
On the subject of the UK’s debt problems, Martin Durkin, the documentary maker, put together a programme for Channel 4 a while ago which is well worth viewing, with comments from the likes of Allister Heath, Mark Littlewood, Kevin Dowd, James Bartholomew, Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe and, for some light relief, Brendan Barber of the TUC (Trades Union Congress).
Guido:
Even if the GDP numbers are not entirely unexpected, they are still a failure, a failure to grow the economy. The deficit can only be paid down if the economy grows, we can’t borrow our way out of a debt crisis. It is time for a supply-side revolution, why is the government implementing a policy of selected regional enterprise zones, why not make the whole economy an enterprise zone? It was a mistake to hike VAT and it is a strategic error to burden industry with crushingly high green taxes, penal marginal income tax rates of over 50% discourage entrepreneurs and investors from coming to Britain.
If the government is going to miss the deficit target, and it is, miss it because the government slashed taxes to grow the economy. The international bond markets will forgive a finance minister with a growing economy who misses his deficit target, they won’t forgive a finance minister with a contracting economy in any circumstances. Chancellor Zero knows that with no growth there is no hope for the deficit.
Whether Guido is right that there is any hope for the deficit, under any circumstances, is a proposition I leave to others to ponder. I quote the above posting because it illustrates something important about Guido himself.
In among all the knockabout gossip about who is sleeping with whom and who is cheating on their expenses, Guido regularly slips in more thoughtful stuff. He regularly, that is to say, drops in explicit libertarian messages, in among all the merely implicit libertarianism about how they are all conspiring with each other to rob us blind. This is why they all hate him so much. He is absolutely not one of them. They want to believe that he is only a gossip monger, and a mere partisan Tory, with no principles other than that he wants his particular team to be in charge of all the robbing and conspiring. But those of his pro-state (I often think more fun than is might be had with that hyphen) enemies and victims with any antenna or honesty know that he is something far more dangerous to them than that. He is a principled libertarian with readership numbers and influence most of them can only dream of. He, more than anyone else in Britain, is responsible for the widespread perception in British politics that the arrival of the internet was a breakthrough for libertarian ideas. Before Guido, we were talking amongst ourselves, which was good. Now Guido regularly shoves it in front of them, which is even better.
Okay, a simplification. Others were doing this before Guido. But none so entertainingly, or to such a wide readership. One of Samizdata’s prouder boasts, I think, is that before Guido found his own blog persona and his own voice as a blogger, he was briefly part of ours.
Here is a photo I took of the great man, at a recent gathering at Samizdata HQ:
A fine if rather blurry addition to this collection. (This is my favourite one of these.)
By the way, do you remember the posting I did here a while back about how so much of what happens in the world is down to two-man teams? Well, these days, anyone who cares knows that there are now two Guidos. I asked original Guido about this at the party where I took the above snap, and the partnership between him and Harry Cole is definitely the real two-man team deal.
Mark Wallace, recently “seen elsewhere” by Guido, makes a good point, in response to a piece by Tim Leunig in the Guardian, about the nature of the mixed housing economy:
Leunig’s Guardian piece claims to calculate that the benefits cap would leave people living on 62p a day. The most crucial element of his workings is that a 4-bedroom house in Tolworth costs £400 a week. That’s true right now, but it wouldn’t be the case once a cap has been brought in.
The truth is that some of the main beneficiaries of overly high benefits are private landlords. They may not get payments from the DWP direct, but they reap the cash anyway through inflated rents, secure in the knowledge that every time they put the price up, benefits levels are raised to pay them. This is a racket, exploiting the foolishness of officials in pumping more and more money out and the absence of taxpayer power to rein in this behaviour.
Tim Leunig is right that if rents were fixed as they are now then his hypothetical family would pay £400 a week. But rents aren’t fixed, they are fluid. If you remove a large amount of cash from the system then prices will fall. By arguing for the system to remain as it currently is, rather than accept a cap, this supposed “progressive” is effectively fighting the corner of benefit-farming landlords.
Government hand-outs to “the poor” enriching the not-so-poor is a familiar story. It explains a lot about the current state of politics. In fact politics generally, down the ages.
Tom Clougherty has an interesting graph up at the ASI blog, taken from this McKinsey report, of the movement in combined public and private debt for the ten biggest of the world’s developed national economies, from 1990 until now. Follow either of the above two links to get a bigger and more legible version of this graph:
Since 2007, of course, all have lurched upwards from wherever they were to quite a bit more.
To me the interesting bits are those between 1990 and 2007. The general trend was a general increase in debt, from somewhat troubling to somewhat more troubling. But three countries bucked this trend: Japan started very bad and merely stayed very bad; Canada started okay-ish and stayed okay-ish; Britain started okay-ish but became very bad. In terms of the direction things went in, Canada has the best graph of them all, and Britain has the worst. Between them, these three graphs, the grey one along the top (Japan), the green one in the pack towards the bottom (Canada), and the dark one moving most determinedly upwards (Britain), make a kind of big and elongated Z.
One other deviation from the norm worth noting is that just before 2007, Germany, unlike any other country, went (see the yellow graph) definitely downwards. It did what Keynes said, in other words, and paid down its debts when times were good, or at least when they seemed good. In Britain, the “Keynesians”, public and private, just carried on running up more debt.
I know that as a fan of Austrianism I am not supposed to get too excited about national economic aggregates. But this set of aggregates and aggregate movements looks to me quite telling. Make of it all what you will. For me, it confirms the sense that many now have that Tony Blair’s government was one of the worse ones that we’ve ever had.
Anyone looking for evidence that the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat government in the UK has the same tidy, but severely limited intelligence of its predecessor need do no more than read this story suggesting that thousands of jury trials held in the country could be axed to save what appears to be a relatively paltry sum, when measured against the dangers and cost to individuals of being wrongfully convicted.
I can understand why jury trials can be an easy target. In my distant past I had a spell covering court cases in the UK and watched several juries at work. It struck me – especially in the more complex fraud cases – that there are clear problems. And maybe – although no politician will dream of saying so – that the British are not as law abiding as they presumably were 50 years ago and therefore the average jury panel reflects this fact. But historians would point out that juries in, say, early 19th Century England could be an awkward bunch. But therein lies the strengths of trial by jury – it is one of the few elements in which ordinary members of the public can be brought into the affairs of civil society by sitting in judgement on the alleged guilt or innocence of their fellows. Juries remind the powerful and the legally sophisticated about the proper order of things.
As I remarked the other day about the dangerously misconceived move by the previous Labour government to scrap the double-jeopardy rule, the ongoing attempts by administrations of all political hues to gut the English Common Law, and the checks and balances of the system, remain one of the most foolish trends in our public life. And that such an idea is being contemplated makes a mockery of the idea that having the Lib Dems in the government coalition will increase, in any way, the supposed liberality of this administration.
Hey, “tyranny” was his word, not mine. Sid Ryan writes in the Guardian:
There have been some serious incidents at the camp in the last few months including: thefts, tents being slashed and minor assaults. These problems are not of Occupy’s making, but they’re happening on its watch. When anyone is challenged about people’s behaviour they’re quick to cry “persecution” and appeal to the founding principles of inclusion. If Occupy can’t solve the problem of behaviour on-site, a hostile media and the police will end the movement before it gets going.
Even people who aren’t aggressive or violent can derail the movement. The very nature of the general assembly (GA), whereby everyone can wield a veto, makes it inevitable. A block should be used only if the blocker feels so strongly that they would rather leave the movement than see it carried through, but it is rarely used as such and rarely with a full understanding of the issues at stake. Occupy proudly states that the GA is “real democracy”, in fact it is a tyranny that makes it possible to drown out a hundred rational voices with a single irrational one.
Schadenfreude aside, Mr Ryan’s article provides an interesting case study of an attempt at non-coercive organisation, a subject that interests many libertarians. Perhaps what stops it working for them is Original Sin. I refer to the sinful desire, shared by both the reformist and the revolutionary wings of Occupy, to coerce others.
Added later: Guardian commenter Forlornehope mentions the Seige of Münster. One hopes events will not come to such a pass that St Paul’s ends up being adorned in the manner of St Lambert’s Church:
Vigorous preparations were made, not only to hold what had been gained, but to proceed from Münster toward the conquest of the world. The city was being besieged by Franz von Waldeck, its expelled bishop. In April 1534 on Easter Sunday, Matthys, who had prophesied God’s judgment to come on the wicked on that day, made a sally with only thirty followers, believing that he was a second Gideon, and was cut off with his entire band. He was killed, his head severed and placed on a pole for all in the city to see, and his genitals nailed to the city gate. Bockelson, better known in history as John of Leiden, was subsequently installed as “king”.
Claiming to be the successor of David, he claimed royal honours and absolute power in the new “Zion”. He justified his actions by the authority of visions from heaven, as others have done in similar circumstances. He legalized polygamy, and himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded one wife himself in the marketplace; this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Community of goods was also established. After obstinate resistance, the city was taken by the besiegers on June 24, 1535, and in January 1536 Bockelson and some of his more prominent followers, after being tortured, were executed in the marketplace. Their dead bodies were exhibited in cages, which hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church; the cages still hang there, though the bones were removed later.
Exposed: Taxman’s ‘illegal’ war against Britain’s small businesses. That is the title of a most interesting report in the Independent. Not so much a war, I would have said, as a shakedown.
The Government is unlawfully using late-payment penalty fines against tens of thousands of small firms who do not file their tax returns on time as a “cash-generating scheme” for the Exchequer.
In a damning judgement, the Tax Tribunal has ruled that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is operating a policy of “deliberately” waiting months before alerting businesses that have not filed their tax returns so that late- payment fines stack up.
…
“It is no function of the state to use the penalty system as a cash-generating scheme,” said the judge, Geraint Jones, QC. “We have no doubt that any right-thinking member of society would consider that to be unfair and falling very far below the standard of fair dealing expected of an organ of the state.”
While applauding his judgement in this case, I question his expectations of standards of fair dealing by an organ of the state. It’s not as if they didn’t try much the same with speed cameras.
I gather HMRC are to appeal*. Confusion to their knavish schemes.
(Via Englishman’s Castle)
*This sentence originally read “I gather HMRC are appealing.” Edited for accuracy.
Jeremy Warner, a columnist at the Daily Telegraph, has a short, thumb-sucker about what happens if Scotland becomes independent, as many Scots (and many English voters and taxpayers) want. Given that the Euro is a partial disaster, no sane Scottish politician would want to campaign to join it, at least not yet. The idea of Scotland staying in the sterling zone is also bit, well, problematic if Scotland breaks free of any fiscal union with the English, or if the English decide to give the Scots the elbow. Could Scotland go back to an old, Scottish currency of its own and would that be viable?
Of course, the land of Adam Smith and David Hume could adopt a gold-backed currency and set a magnificent new trend, but given the socialistic nature of most Scottish politicians seeking independence, that does not seem very likely, but you never know. I always felt that if the SNP wanted to really pull a trick, they should seek to turn Scotland into a sort of northern Switzerland.
Here is an old essay by Lawrence White about Scottish banking.
I listen a lot to Radio 3, the classical music channel, especially first thing in the morning. This inevitably involves listening to BBC news bulletins, which can be quite an ordeal. This morning, as my brain surfaced into consciousness, I heard a strange item, about how the government intends to switch the subsidies it gives to the British movie industry towards more popular movies, presumably away from whatever unpopular movies government subsidies had hitherto been encouraging.
Two questions immediately present themselves.
First, how does the government expect to be able to foretell which films will be popular, before they are made? Many very highly paid, very clever people routinely fail in this task, despite such people entirely concentrating (in extreme contrast to people run governments) on trying to be right about such things. What makes our government suppose that it can do any better than such persons?
And second, are not “popular” movies the exact sort of movies as would be encouraged in a totally free market? So what is the point of such subsidies? Would it not be more sensible simply to get rid of them altogether?
This seems to be the story that my half-awake mind latched onto this morning. For once, I agree with Ken Loach, who appears briefly in the video report. This is indeed typical Tory crassness. Many “mainstream” movies, or at any rate movies intended to be maintream, fail. But, and here I presumably do not agree with Ken Loach, all other government movie subsidies are also crass.
It is surprisingly easy to get the sign wrong when reasoning about quantities. Consider this old riddle:
Three ladies go to a restaurant for a meal. They receive a bill for $30. They each put $10 on the table, which the waiter collects and takes to the till. The cashier informs the waiter that the bill should only have been for $25 and returns $5 to the waiter in $1 coins. On the way back to the table the waiter realizes that he cannot divide the coins equally between the ladies. As they didn’t know the total of the revised bill, he decides to put $2 in his own pocket and give each of the ladies $1.
Now that each lady has been given a dollar back, each of the ladies has paid $9. Three times 9 is 27. The waiter has $2 in his pocket. Two plus 27 is $29. The ladies originally handed over $30. Where is the missing dollar?
To get the missing $1 in the question we have done this arithmetic: 10 + 10 + 10 – 1 – 1 – 1 + 2 – 30 = -1
The correct arithmetic is: 10 + 10 + 10 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 25 = 0
Positive numbers represent payments from the ladies to the restaurant, and negative numbers represent money received by the restaurant. The result should obviously always come out to zero. That +2 should be a -2. Okay, there is a 30 where there should be a 25 as well, but only because the +2 yielded an intermediate result of 29 which is close enough to 30 to cause confusion.
This getting the sign wrong is the same mistake that means Tim Worstall has to point out that jobs are a cost. The new widget factory will create 1000 jobs, we are told. If it produces 1000 widgets per year, that means we get one widget per man-year of time. The man-year of time is a cost. If we could somehow arrange for the widget factory to create only 100 jobs for the same output, we would have just as many widgets and 900 man-years left to spend on some other useful thing. We would be richer.
This mistake crops up in trivial ways all the time. My friend recently gave up full-time work to look after the children for various financial and logistical reasons. Think how the economy is losing out, she mused. Not only am I not producing widgets, I am not paying the nursery workers or buying train tickets for my commute. Well it is true that the widgets my friend used to make are no longer made, but the nursery workers do not count: the same amount of childcare is being done as was being done before. It is not correct to add the childcare previously done by the nursery worker to the childcare now done by my friend. At worst there is now an unemployed nursery worker who will go and do something else instead, but that is just a market optimising everyone’s activities to match the level of demand. The train tickets were just part of the cost of getting the widgets made.
Ah, train tickets. We are going to get a new high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. The government is going to ‘invest’ £32.7bn in order to reap up to £46.9bn of ‘economic benefits’. I wonder how many of these benefits have the wrong sign. Counted among the benefits are “hundreds of jobs”, but these are already included in the cost figure.
Also counted are ticket sales. Which makes sense if the ‘investment’ was really an investment. But invest here really means to steal from the British public £32.7bn so that they can then pay, say, £40bn for train tickets in exchange for £40bn worth of train travel. I make that -32.7 – 40 + 40 = -32.7. Where is the missing £32.7bn?
Author’s note: It seems that we have started Monday in full “let’s shoot at Cameron” mode today. Well, it is still the game shooting season.
The comments from UK prime minister David Cameron, saying it would be wrong to scrap the UK top income rate of 50 per cent on incomes of £150,000 a year or more (which when other changes are taken into account, means a marginal rate of more than 60 per cent), are typical of this regime. The government knows that the tax rate is well on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, but this, remember, is a regime that cares with almost pathological zeal about the image it projects. The key is to show that those evil, high-earning bastards (like the sort of people who start businesses and run them) take their “fair” share of the current pain being inflicted in the name of deficit reduction.
The Tories played a high price for an inept general election campaign that required them to ally with the Liberal Democrats, a party full of people whose hostility to entrepreneurship and wealth creation is even more severe than it among parts of the Labour Party. And this hostility to high earners comes particularly ill from politicians, such as Mr Cameron, who have enjoyed the benefits of a rich inheritance rather than having to get their hands dirty by creating a business from scratch. Very ill, indeed.
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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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