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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Here is a pretty good article in the Telegraph, by Nancy Soderberg (who she?), arguing that taxpayers of the UK should not be giving money to Argentina. It is a country that, with hardly a shred of legal or other justification, wishes to claim back territories (the Falkland Islands) that it unsuccessfully attempted to capture 30 years ago by force of arms:
“Argentina, after all, is acting with scant regard for the international community. Over the past decade it has pursued a deliberate strategy of playing games with financial markets. Its default on £51 billion of debt in 2001 turned it into a financial pariah, a status that was not enhanced by two subsequent unilateral debt restructurings. To this day, Argentina remains shut out of the world’s capital markets. To make matters worse, it also nationalised private pension funds, thereby providing itself with a captive domestic market into which it could sell its debt.”
“The government has since been sued by creditors around the world as they try to force Argentina to honour its obligations. In the Southern District Court of New York alone, there have been more than 170 bondholder lawsuits, resulting in more than 100 judgments. Today, Argentina still owes more than £15 billion in old debts ranging from Paris Club loans, to bondholders, and to foreign investors holding arbitral awards from the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). In each case, Argentina has refused to play by the rules. It has demanded a Paris Club restructuring without the mandatory IMF monitoring, it has ignored New York court judgments, and it has insisted, in blatant disregard of its treaty obligations under ICSID, that arbitral awards be brought to Argentina for “approval” by its own courts.”
Argentina is refusing to let UK-registered vessels enter any of its ports, and has also sought to enlist other Latin American countries in putting the squeeze on the UK. Now of course some of this can be dismissed as “sabre-rattling”, and no doubt, in their quieter moments, many Argentine people who have endured a variety of useless or vicious governments will think that the latest antics of their government are absurd. But it is clear that bullies need to be confronted eventually. The UK government should terminate any aid to Argentina without delay. Indeed, it should terminate aid, full stop, to any country, democratic or otherwise.
One of the things that stuck in my mind when reading the late Christopher Hitchens’ brilliant “Hitch 22” memoirs was his description of how he felt about the Thatcher administration in confronting the military junta of Argentina in 1982. I think it was Hitchens’ first realisation that his youthful leftism meant he had to take sides with some pretty stupid people, and that he began a long, slow reappraisal of some of his ideas. As the Falklanders no doubt asked themselves in 1982, do we really want to be taken over by this lot?
Of course, it is all about ooooiiilllll!
For a bit of background, here is a reasonably fair account of the history of the Falkland Islands, which have been attached to the UK since the 1830s, an era when Argentina had only begun to exist as an independent nation in its own right.
“Back in Britain, the Mail on Sunday ran an interesting feature this weekend about a different example of what certainly sounded like a health and safety overreaction. It told the tale of a man who drowned in a shallow boating pond in his local park, after suffering an epileptic seizure while feeding swans. A passer-by (a woman who was in charge of a small child so did not dare enter the pond) called the emergency services. But the first firemen to show up announced that they only had Level One training, for ankle-deep water, and needed to wait for a specialist team with Level Two training for chest-deep water. By the time that team arrived, the man had been floating in the pond for 37 minutes. While waiting for that specialist help, the same firemen also strongly urged a policeman not to attempt a rescue in the pond, even refusing to lend the policeman a life-vest. Then the policeman’s control room told him not to enter the water, as the victim had been in the pond so long that it was a body retrieval mission, not a rescue.”
Writes a columnist in The Economist.
Then there is this:
“It is tempting to conclude that Britain has fallen into a serious problem with regulation, red tape and crippling risk-aversion.”
You think so? In fairness, the column is pretty good and it even goes on to wonder whether there is something seriously wrong with the UK national character. I tend to be a bit wary about such broad generalisations, though.
We are often told, even by so-called “left libertarians” who claim to be in favour of markets but not corporatism, that modern corporations, with their evil limited liability protections, favours from the state and so on, can roll over a democratic government and shaft the general public. Up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact, the situation is far more complicated. Some firms seem remarkably weak when confronted with some pressures, which makes me wonder why Hollywood movies still insist on portraying corporate executives as flinty-eyed, heartless bastards on the take. (The irony is, of course, that some of the most ruthless corporations are in the film business).
As evidence, Brendan O’Neill has this excellent piece in the Telegraph about Tesco’s, workfare, and the influence of the “Twitterati”:
“What could be worse than the government’s workfare programme?”, almost every columnist in the land is currently asking. I can think of one thing worse: the awesome and terrifying power of the commentariat and its slavish groupies amongst the Twitterati to strike down initiatives like workfare and almost any other government project that they don’t like. That’s the real story here. Forget the historically illiterate wailing about young people being forced into “slave labour” or the idea that getting yoof to work in return for money is the Worst Thing Ever. The ins and outs of workfare itself pale into insignificance when compared with the new power of tiny cliques of cut-off people to override public opinion and reshape modern Britain.
The speed with which first Tesco, that supposedly arrogant monolith of the high street, and then others withdrew from the workfare scheme was alarming. It was a testament both to the sheepishness of modern corporations (remember this next time someone starts banging on about “free-market fundamentalism”) and to the authority of the therapeutic, suspicious-of-wealth, pro-state, anti-big-business sections of the well-fed media classes, who can now put powerful institutions on the spot simply by penning a few ill-thought-through articles with the word “SLAVE” in them.
One possible quibble: has this not been the case for decades, even centuries? Consider that the opinion-forming classes have tended to be concentrated in the London area, have tended to have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers? This is hardly new. What has changed, clearly, is that in the age of the internet, the speed with which this class can make its voice heard accelerates.
I always thought it was a bit optimistic to imagine that blogging, the internet and so on would massively shift the balance of forces in terms of who gets to influence debate in a country like the UK. The mainstream media still carries big influence, especially television. And our political class, drawn as it is from a relatively shallow pool of talent, is as susceptible to the influence of such opinions as it ever was. However, what I think has changed for the better is that more of us, such as O’Neill and so on, can attack the conventional wisdom through the medium of the internet rather than hope that our letters get printed in some corner of a newspaper.
There is also more of what we might call a “swarm effect” these days with certain issues; I think the internet definitely magnifies this phenomenon. Another consequence is that memory of certain events gets ever shorter as the news cycle spins faster and faster. The Singularity is near!!!.
Update: Guido Fawkes has a delicious twist on this whole business about “workfare” – it involves the Guardian.
An MP gets drunk and goes berserk:
Was Eric Joyce MP perhaps trying to stimulate the economy? I found that link in this ancient posting here by Paul Marks.
Guido, where I found the above picture, is all over it, as you would expect.
I know, I know, all very regrettable. Not proper behaviour at all. But my immediate thoughts, when I first saw the Evening Standard front page headlines out in the London streets this afternoon, were: Would that all the rampages of the politicians did as little damage; and: If only, as here, they only tried to do damage to each other.
“We have become keener on being individuals, or at most small tribes in our communities. When we are asked directly about which class we belong to, we reply politely, but wearily, and play the game for old times’ sake. The whole thing is now a bit of a charade. Snobbery still exists, but it is comical or pathetic and no longer has a cutting edge. I would argue that we are now a nation of cultures rather than a nation of classes. If we look at the passion with which people describe what they do in their leisure time, you have a truer picture of our society today. That’s where the energy is; that’s who we are now.”
– Melvyn Bragg.
For the benefit of non-Brits, I should point out that Bragg is one of those fixtures of the UK media/culture scene who has been around since forever on TV programmes such as the South Bank Show; he was a pal of some of the New Labour types in the 90s and Noughties; he has been a novelist, TV personality and part of the “Great and Good” who play a role in the state-backed arts world. Definitely not a Samizdata sort of guy, although he does say some perceptive things in the article I link to here.
A retired businessman by the name of Christopher Tappin is to be extradited to the US for allegedly trying to sell batteries for Iranian missiles. Serious stuff, you might agree. But as I read in a long Times (of London) article on Saturday (behind a paywall and no, I am not writing it all out), one of the most disturbing features of this man’s indictment in absentia is that no attempt has been made to establish, in the UK, any sort of prima facie case that he might be guilty. Instead, a grand jury in the US has ruled, apparently, that he is suspected of being involved in something dodgy. As a result, he faces two choices: admit guilt and face a short, but nevertheless, tough prison term in the US and have a criminal record for the rest of his life, or, plead not guilty and take his chances in the US legal system and face a 35-year jail term, as well as bankrupt himself in trying to get legal representation.
Even worse than the abuse of due process involved (the man apparently was not even aware of the grand jury ruling) is that the UK government, despite some alarm being raised by MPs, seems quite happy to transfer British citizens to the US in this way without any significant legal safeguards. This is all of a piece with how, as I have written before, the US is also bullying other countries in the name of halting tax evasion by forcing foreign financial institutions to undertake all kinds of onerous compliance checks to ensure that all American clients are accounted for. What makes such issues so sensitive is that this appears to be a one-way street: far more Britons, it seems, are getting packed off to the US for various alleged offences than is the case with Americans being extradited to stand trial in the UK.
It is a good feature of friendly relations between countries that there should be mutual recognition of important principles. And the cavalier treatment of certain principles of due process of law in the extradition case of this Mr Tappin character is a sign that the extradition treaty of 2003 between the US and UK is not working as intended, is oppressive, and should be scrapped or significantly reformed without delay. There may not be many votes in this issue, but it is important.
A lot of articles have been written on this subject. Here is a good item in the Daily Telegraph back in 2009.
Madsen Pirie’s new book, Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute was launched earlier this evening in the crypt of St John’s, Smith Square. Here is what it says in the book’s first chapter, entitled “Shaping an institute” (pp. 3-4):
There was an institute in London which drew heavily on Smith’s ideas, and those of the free-market economists who had followed in his wake. This was the Institute of Economic Affairs (lEA), founded by Sir Antony Fisher twenty years earlier, and which had published a steady stream of monographs analyzing the deficiencies of central direction, state planning and economic intervention. They were intellectually rigorous, and had made their way into the literature of economics libraries, albeit in a separate corner, almost fenced off from the mainstream.
But we wanted something more. It was all very well to win theoretical arguments, but nothing seemed to happen afterwards. Governments continued on their unruly ways, while academics devised new follies to set up on the wreckage of the old ones. We wanted to change reality; to have an impact on what actually happened. We wanted to make policy.
Adam Smith might have been one strong influence on our thinking, but there were others. One was James Buchanan, the Nobel Laureate who, with Gordon Tullock, James Niskanen and others, developed what came to be known as Public Choice Theory. In essence ‘it took the ideas of economics into the domain of politics and administration. Instead of ‘treating politicians and civil servants as selfless seekers after public good, the theory treated them as if they were ordinary economic participants, out to maximize their own advantage, just like other people. it proved a very fertile theory tor explaining what would otherwise have been incomprehensible outcomes. It also fitted in with the rather less than respectful way that we ourselves regarded politicians.
Public Choice told us how minority interest groups could hijack the political agenda to have advantages created for themselves. It explained how politicians respond to pressure from vociferous and self-interested groups, but not from a public at large which might be largely unconscious of the effect policy made upon it. Public Choice Theory was basically a critique, but we began to wonder if there could be a creative counterpart to it. Just as Public Choice Theory told us why certain policies were doomed to political failure, however economically sound they might be, could it not be used to create policies that would not be subject to these limitations? Could new free-market strategies be crafted that flowed with political reality by building in the support of the interest groups which might otherwise derail them?
This was powerful stuff. …
Indeed it was. As soon as I’ve read the rest of this book, I’ll tell you what I think of it.
Meanwhile, here is a picture I took at the launch, of the author hard at work signing copies.
Not surprisingly, the ASI blog already has a posting up on the subject.
Let me see
An officer has been scheduled to visit to find out if TV is being watched or recorded illegally. The Officer may visit your property at any day of the week, morning or evening
And he may stand outside and knock at your door like any other member of the public. You are perfectly free to then let him in, not let him in, stand there and stare at him oddly for a time whilst making clucking noises, or suggest he undertake in biologically impossible sexual acts. Entirely your call.
We can apply to court for a search warrant to gain access to your property
Yes, you can, just as you can jump off a cliff, flap your arms, and see if you can fly. The fact that (after I have lived at this address for two and a half years) you are still addressing me as “Legal Occupier” does tend to suggest to me that I should perhaps not quake in my boots too much. Magistrates are not, as I understand it, generally terribly impressed when people apply for warrants to enter the premises of unknown people who are not known to be breaking the law in any way. Or even known people who are not known to be breaking the law in any way, for that matter. Oddly enough, I get letters from Sky from time to time suggesting that I might want to pay them money in return for television services, also. Since soon after I arrived here, they have been addressed to “Dr Michael Jennings”, suggesting that it is not actually very hard to find out who lives here. Although they have not actually been any more successful in getting me to pay them money then the TV licensing people have, they have at least been polite, and haven’t threatened me with anything. It is almost as if they think I have a choice.
An officer can take your statement under caution, in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or Scottish Criminal Law
Anything you say to the Officer may be used as evidence in court
Best not to say anything then, hey?
You risk a fine of up to £1,000, in addition to legal costs
This is why, if they do actually obtain evidence that you are watching television without a licence, possibly because your naive flatmate or one of your children let the nice man into your flat when you were not there, you should offer to pay for a television licence at once. The TV licence men get paid a commission when you do this, so it is usually not too much trouble to get them to agree to it. (Agreeing to pay it retrospectively is much better than being taken to court. This is another reason why the only people actually taken to court tend to be penniless single mothers). However, it’s generally better to teach your flatmates and children to never let vampires, politicians, people from television licensing, or census enumerators into your home under any circumstances, and make it understood that they will be punished harshly if they do.
A reminder of the law
Oooh. Bold writing.
It is illegal to watch or record television programmes as they are being shown on TV without a TV Licence – no matter what device you do.
Let us know if you don’t need one at www.tvlicensing.co.uk/noTV or by calling 0300 7906097. We
may visit to confirm this.
And if they do, you are once again free to let them in, not let them in, stand there and stare oddly for a time while making clucking noises, or suggest they undertake in biologically impossible sexual acts. Once again, I wish them well in obtaining a warrant to enter your premises to verify that you are not doing anything illegal, given that there is no evidence that you are other than your claim that you aren’t. TV licensing are actually well known for paying no attention to people who tell them they do not have a TV – everyone does, after all. Let’s see if we can instead persuade your children to let us into your home so that we can prove that you are lying.
Slightly more seriously, the rhythm of these missives from TV licensing can be predicted. They start out polite, and they gradually gain more red highlighting, and become steadily more threatening. Then, after a cycle of about six, they go back to polite, and work their way up again. Only once did a man from TV licensing actually make a visit. On this occasion, there was a knock on the door of my flat at about 9am one morning. A stern voice asked “Can I have a word with you?” in a semi-threatening tone. I asked who he was. He answered “TV licensing”. I explained politely that while the stairway and corridors of the block of flats in which I live are shared by the various tenants of the building, they are not a public place, and that he was therefore trespassing, and that if he wished to talk to me he should go downstairs, shut the door to the building behind him, ring my bell, and talk to me on the intercom. I don’t know how he had got in – perhaps he had rung the bell of one of the other tenants and claimed to be the postman. Or perhaps he had been let in by the naive flatmate or one of the small children of one of the other tenants.
In any event, I spoke no more and returned to my kitchen to finish preparing my breakfast. He spoke no more to me, either. Several minutes later, a piece of paper quite similar to the one scanned above came through the mail slot in the door of my flat, explaining that someone from television licensing had called but that I had been out, that if I was watching television without a licence I was BREAKING THE LAW, and that another visit would be scheduled soon.
That was about two years ago.
‘“Quantitative Easing is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich,” he says, “It floods banks with money, which they use to pay themselves bonuses. The banks have money, and assets, so they can borrow easily. The poor guy, who is unemployed and can’t borrow, is not going to benefit from it.” The QE process pushes asset prices up, he says, which is great for those who own stocks, shares and expensive houses. “But the state is subsidising the rich. It is the top 1 per cent who benefit from Quantitative Easing, not the 99 per cent.”’
– Nassim Taleb, quoted on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog.
Tim Sandefur makes some good points on why surveillance cameras are not necessarily “Orwellian”, by pointing out that if it is intrusive to have a camera in a public street, why do people not complain if a police officer or some other official of the State is patrolling up and down? However, where I think the debate gets a bit tangled is that for many people, while CCTV is good at recording crimes, it records the incidents after they have taken place. It is less clear if these cameras have a deterrent effect in the same way that police patrols might do. CCTV did not, as far as I can tell, appreciably affect the pattern of the London mayhem of last August. Local authorities and other bodies may claim that CCTV really does cut crime, but I am not sure how reliable such statements really are. In the area where I live – Pimlico – there were a number of street robberies on women and the area has its share of CCTV (which is not surprising as the area is full of politicians, such as former defence ministers, in one case).
In summary, CCTV might not be as Big Brother as some fear, but the real problem is that it is only of limited use in deterring thugs.
Separately, I hardly ever read articles thinking through the implications of last August’s disgraceful looting, violence and mayhem. How easy we forget.
This is an astonishingly foolish idea by David Cameron, and I hope firms tell him to get lost. Forcing firms to set a quota on how many women can sit on boards may go over well with those who demand equality in some superficial way, but this is bound to cause concerns, as with any quota system set by the State, that merit will in some cases take second place to the Gods of gender equality. Apart from anything else, what the hell is the UK government – and one that has supposed to have “conservatives” in it, doing telling private firms how they should compose their management structure?
Alas, this is an administration that has been trying to fix the pay levels of private business, so it would be a natural, logical step for it to further interfere in business. Of course, David “the useless” Cameron knows all about running a business, doesn’t he? He’s had a rich experience in creating firms, running them and creating wealth. Forgive my sarcasm, but it is difficult not to take such a tone when contemplating such daftness.
Now, there may be reasons why women, for one reason or another, are under-represented on boardroom committees. It may have escaped Mr Cameron’s attention, but even in a complete free market without any distortions, women, given certain biological issues about, you know, having children, might be less willing or able, other things being equal, to get to the point where sitting on a boardroom was something they did to the same degree as men. Of course, there may also be prejudices to work against, but in a competitive marketplace, if firms are turning their backs on women out of bigotry, then more enlightened ones would surely get a clear competitive advantage by choosing people on merit, and if that means more women, all well and good. But to assume that unless half of all boardroom slots are filled by women that there has been conscious discrimination and this needs to be reversed by law, is absurd and oppressive. We have already seen the counterproductive effects of “affirmative action” (ie, discrimination) on racial grounds in the US over matters such as admission to university.
This government is proving, in some ways, to be even worse than the last one. No wonder that people now believe that we have one of the most anti-business governments for years, as is the view of Allister Heath at CityAM.
… to save the NHS, says Ed Miliband.
My first thought was, gosh, that’s nice, three months in which to kill it. I suspect that I am in a minority: the outpouring of love, loyalty and vows to defend the NHS unto death coming from the Guardian commenters to this report and to Miliband’s own article resemble nothing so much as the frenzied cries of “Deus vult!” that greeted Pope Urban II when he declared the First Crusade. I further suspect that when it comes to this issue the knights of the Guardian would indeed get support from the peasants of the Sun and the Daily Mail.
Heigh-ho. Just for the record, I shall repost an article that is now more than ten years old. It is by Anthony Browne, once Health Editor of the Guardian‘s Sunday sister, the Observer, and at one time a passionate supporter of the NHS:
Even as you read this, in almost every hospital in the country, there will be elderly, vulnerable people left for hours and sometimes days on trolleys. Each year, thousands of British people – the young, the old, the rich, the poor – die unnecessarily from lack of diagnosis, lack of treatment and lack of drugs. They die and suffer unnecessarily for different reasons, but there is just one root cause: the blind faith the Government has in the ideology of the National Health Service, and our unwillingness to accept not just that it doesn’t work, but that it can never work.
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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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