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The first I heard of it was here, where there was a piece about how this guy had been mocking this guy, guy number two being Tate Galleries boss Nicholas Serota. Serota faces cuts in state funding for The Arts, i.e. for himself and his enthusiasms, and he is not happy. He calls this “blitzkrieg”, clearly having never heard of Godwin’s Law. So, the pips are starting to squeak. Maybe this Cameron chap is not quite as bad as Perry de Havilland says.
The last time I read the Guardian very regularly was in those far off days before the internet, for its cricket coverage. Critics of pieces like Serota’s might be allowed about one or two short letters, next to three or four longer and very supportive ones, or ones claiming that the idiot argument in question wasn’t idiotic enough. How times have changed. What struck me most about this week’s Serotage was the number of commenters who weren’t impressed by his arguments.
Which can be summarised as: The Arts is (a) good, and (b) good in particular for “the economy”. But if The Arts is so good for the economy, why does The Arts seem to depend for its very survival on state subsidy. If the economy loves The Arts so much, why can it not pay for it? Cutting subsidies for The Arts would be a mere pinprick for The Arts if The Arts was economically successful, not a blitzkrieg.
Subsidised art – The Arts – does indeed depend upon a continuing flow of subsidy, but art itself is a far sturdier thing. Many commenters said how much they dislike The Arts of the sort that Serota presides over. Fair enough. I dislike Serotanism not so much because I hate The Arts as because I love art, and think that The Arts gets in the way of art far more than The Arts contributes to art, in much the same kind of way that I think subsidised car companies were bad for the British car industry, or that I think that NASA has got in the way of and continues to get in the way of space exploration. The Arts crowds out art, in other words. Serota thinks that art depends on The Arts. Well, as several of those commenters pointed out, he would, wouldn’t he?
If I understand Mr Cameron’s attitude correctly, he will be rather pleased about this particular squeaking by this particular pip. You see, he will say to the poor, in answer to their squeaks about the cuts they are now facing. Consumers of and practitioners of The Arts are also suffering. We are spreading the pain.
But will Cameron contrive any kind of economic recovery, or merely a softer-than-might-have-been landing into the swamp of permanent economic stagnation, followed by more sinking? Are these cuts really cuts as in less state money, or merely cuts as in not as much of an increase in state money as had been hoped for? My opinion about that being that the first can, for those directly involved, feel a lot like the second, as more people get sucked into the state money business and away from having productive lives. Between them, all these people do go on getting more and more, but for many an individual state money chaser, it may really be a cut. And even dashed hopes must feel a lot like genuine cuts, if you have already spent the money you had hoped to get.
What’s wrong with capitalism is that the banking system is socialist.
– Steve Baker MP talking on Cobden Centre Radio. Blog posting by interviewer and CCR boss Andy Duncan here. Listen here. It lasts twenty six minutes. That money quote comes just over half way into it.
That Tim Evans certainly gets about. The last time I had cause to mention him here, he was emailing me about a Cobden Centre scheme to put Austrian economics on the map. Now, with another hat on that I have not seen him wearing before, he is emailing everyone of consequence in the known universe about this (read the whole thing here – it is just over twenty pages long), which is about how the British Government should allow rather than smother the UK version of the space industry, smother having been its preferred policy until now.
And you know? This just might work. If I were the British Government just now, I would be highly receptive to anything which I could call Doing Something, which did not Cost Too Much, and which preferably hardly cost anything at all. True, the report’s author James C. Bennett does recommend a few fact finding junkets for British regulators, to enable them to learn how to create the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, which is must be, he says:
… predictable, sensible, provide reasonable guarantees of safety and make the UK a venue of choice for space operations …
Why can the rules not be along the lines of: do what you want with your own property, provided it is within the laws of contract (e.g. not deafening to people who have been promised no deafening), provided nobody is swindled or deliberately incinerated (accidental incineration being inevitable from time to time in a business like this), and provided that you do not get so angry with any gawping onlookers that you try to murder them. You don’t need a trip to Canada or Australia or India to devise a set of rules like that.
But then again, such expeditions can be fun, and I suppose there have to be inducements to Government people to behave sensibly. And such is the state of the modern world – the EUropean bit of it especially – that if some activity has not been supplied with the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, it can not even start.
It so happens that James C. Bennett is in the room with me as I write this, he being in Britain now to promote this thing, and he has just said, in connection with the above:
”Better to send regulators to Ottawa than to Paris.”
Indeed.
Indeed:
Mr Bean said that encouraging Britons to spend was one reason why the Bank had cut interest rates.
The Cobden Centre’s James Tyler is not impressed, that being where I found out about this latest piece of Keynesian crassness.
Trainee accountant Paul Chambers has been in court.
He landed a £1,000 fine after the snow closed Robin Hood airport near Doncaster in January as he planned a trip to see “Crazycolours,” a Northern Irish girl he had just met online, and he tweeted to his 690 followers: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
A week later, he was arrested at work by five police officers, questioned for eight hours, had his computers and phones seized and was subsequently charged and convicted of causing a “menace” under the Communications Act 2003.
His defence lawyer asked if John Betjeman’s famous lines about Slough –
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now
– would have caused him to be convicted under the Communications Act 2003, had he the misfortune to live in this blighted age.
Hey, stupid cops and stupid Robin Hood airport security people. Could we not have demonstrations of insane literal-mindedness from people whose poxy airport is named after a bandit ?
Last night, I attended a very entertaining Adam Smith Insitute event at which Eamonn Butler and guests talked about Austrian economics. Mr Butler has a new book out and it is an excellent, succinct summary of what this form of economics is all about. And he touches, very briefly, on the issue that seems to be getting some people worked up into a tizzy: fractional reserve banking. FRB is an issue we have already had a good working over on at this site and a good comment thread. A brief summary of my view is that I don’t think many forms of FRB would be able to survive in a pure free market without bailouts, “too big to fail” protections, government deposit protection, etc. But it should not be banned: if folk want to take the risk of depositing money in an FRB account, then that is their business, like smoking, off-piste skiing and unprotected sex. With currency competition and removal of legal tender laws, such FRB banks would have to be run with ruthless attention to risk control. So I don’t see the need for any restrictions.
However, what annoys me about the reaction of fellows like this is that they seem to be supposing that the current banking system, the system that has recently been brought almost to its knees, with such shining examples such as Northern Rock, the Dunfirmline Building Society, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS, etc, etc, is somehow basically okay. Riiiight. They are saying that those pesky Austrians, with their “loopy” ideas about how two people cannot simultaneously hold the same claim to the same money at the same time (which strikes me as a perfectly sensible view, in fact), should shut up. Well, they are not going to shut up.
I have to say I find the sheer gall of these “why don’t these guys shut up?” line of analysis to be pretty unedifying. If FRB – at least as it currently operates – is so splendid, and if banking really is about “borrowing short and lending long”, then maybe the defenders of the current form of banking could explain to the taxpayers of the UK quite why we have had had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds in the recent banking clusterfuck. Just asking.
From the Telegraph: ‘Koran burning’: men expect to be charged with inciting racial hatred
From the BBC: Men arrested in Gateshead over suspected Koran burning.
From the Guardian… nothing that I can see right now (9.45 am). This absence is being remarked upon in the comments sections of unrelated Guardian stories.
Correction – upon searching I see the Guardian did have a story yesterday. The remarks I mentioned are on the absence of comment or commentable pieces dealing with this story in today’s paper. Quite right too. This is a big story for two reasons. Firstly, who would have thought it? After all that buildup, Pastor Terry Jones, the ticks-every-stereotype gun-toting American pastor, did not burn any Korans. Instead the deed was done in the car park of a Gateshead pub. The second big aspect of this story is explained in this line from the Guardian story I did not see earlier:
Northumbria police said the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the video, but on suspicion of burning the Qur’an.
All usual caveats apply. I consider burning a religion’s holy book to be a nasty deliberate insult. People should still be free to do it. They should also be free to video themselves doing it and distribute the video, whether or not it spreads religious or racial hatred. I am not in favour of the hatred. I am in favour of the freedom. Anyway, I sort-of knew that the video distribution was probably illegal upon grounds of spreading religious hatred. I did not know the burning itself was.
Further update: Confusingly, there is now another Guardian story illustrated by exactly the same picture as the first one but directly contradicting it in what it says about the actual grounds for arrest: Quote:
The six men were arrested on suspicion of stirring racial hatred, police said, which is outlawed under the 1986 public order act. They were not arrested for the actual attack on, and burning of, the Qur’an, but in connection with the posting of the video. Section 21 of the 1986 act reads: “A person who distributes, or shows or plays, a recording of visual images or sounds which are threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or … racial hatred is likely to be stirred up.”
Last update, I promise: Yet another confusing aspect of this story is that according to the second Guardian story, the men have been charged with stirring up racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act, not religious hatred at all.
Will the prosecution be able to make that – the racial angle – stick? Do they even want to? So far as I know, scarcely anyone has actually been prosecuted under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. One might have thought this would be an ideal opportunity for the authorities to try out the Act in the courts, if they were serious. Could it be that the racial hatred charge is intended to fail and is merely a piece of theatre to placate Muslims and protect our troops in Afghanistan?
I guess it will be interesting to see whether there is any pressure among backbench Tory MPs – or at least some of the more intelligent ones – for the government to try and edge out “Vince” Cable from his post as Business Secretary, following a terrible speech that has been monstered in many quarters, such as here, and here.
The funny thing is, had Cable said something on the lines of “risky gambling by banks and hedge funds has been a problem and has been encouraged by irresponsible central banks”, he’d have a very good point. Had he, in his attack on monopolies, attacked the regulations, taxes and other government moves that drive up barriers to entry, he’d also be correct. But he does nothing of the kind. He’s a sort of economist who, trained from, I suspect, neo-classical textbooks full of elegant supply-demand curves rather than real human beings, imagines that any market that does not have a vast number of identical players with no pricing power or edge is “imperfect”, and therefore in need of correction by government. He ignores how it is the very “imperfections” of the real world – such as differences in tastes, values, levels of knowledge and so on – that give markets their raison d’etre, as understood by the “Austrian” school, with its view of competition as a discovery process, not as a static game full of omniscient Gods.
In fact, the government actions that lead to less flexible markets continue to get worse, which is something Mr Cable seems not to be dealing with. At the moment, the Financial Services Authority, the UK financial regulator, is rolling out a programme of “reforms” called, excitingly, the Retail Distribution Review. The aim, which sounds very noble, is to raise the standard and independence of financial advice. The effect, however, will be to drive hundreds of financial advisors out of business – some industry figures predict that as many as 20 per cent of UK IFAs could go by the time the RDR takes full effect in 2012. This, of course, only worsens the problem of how financial advice is often something that ordinary UK citizens rarely use.
Here is something I wrote before on attacks on the City.
There is a new film out, with a fairly strong, leftie vibe about it, called Made in Dagenham, celebrating the campaign by women factory workers in the late 1960s to get the same pay as their male counterparts. It sounds such a self-evidently just cause that no doubt any film-goers will come out of the cinema nodding to themselves about the rightness of the cause and the evil of the chauvinist, exploiter bastards who presided over the previous, unjust state of affairs. Throw in lots of period costumes and some nice background music and this is a sort of feelgood movie, in a way.
The trouble is, as I suspect readers will tell, is that the situation is not quite as simple as all that. As Tim Worstall occasionally likes to point out, a lot of the supposed injustice involved in lower pay for women for doing the same jobs as men has a perfectly rational basis, however politically unpalatable it might be to say so. Here is another one of his articles over in the Guardian (brave man, is Tim).
In part, it is worth remembering that in the far more unionised labour market of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the resistence to women entering the workforce to do the same work as men came from male trade union members, not from the firms. And companies, realising that many women are as talented, if not a damn sight more so, than the men, obviously realised that they could attract such workers willing to work for a slightly lower wage than their male counterparts. Outside unionised businesses, such a difference was likely to be even more marked. It reminds me of the fact that the labour movement, with such features like the closed shop, has often been at odds with the Left’s alleged concerns for things such as equality between the sexes and races. I would be interested to know if this aspect of the labour movement comes out in the film.
I suspect that, absent labour market restrictions such as closed shops and other deliberate barriers to entry, women’s pay would have approached that of the men much faster than it did, but for reasons adduced by the likes of Tim Worstall, there will remain gaps which cannot be blamed on the free market.
Jeff Randall states the bleedin’ obvious…
Cuts, cuts, cuts. At this week’s Trades Union Congress, delegates talked of little else. George Osborne’s plans for reductions in government spending were denounced by his adversaries as “eye-watering” and “blood-curdling”.
[…]
This is what happens when the state is shrunk, right? Er, not quite. In fact, not at all. In terms of cash flowing out of the Treasury’s coffers, there is no evidence of cutting back. Total government outlay is set to go up this year, next year and every year thereafter to 2014-15.
According to estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the figures will be £696 billion in 2010-11 (up from £669 billion in 2009-10), then £699 billion, £711 billion, £722 billion and £737 billion. These sums are not inflation-adjusted, but even so, they belie the idea that a demon barber is about to “polish off” the Budget and stuff its remains into one of Mrs Lovett’s delicious meat pies.
The lunatics took over the asylum many years ago and all that has changed is that a different bunch of lunatics are in charge now. How could anyone have expected anything else from someone like that jackanapes Cameron? Moreover he has been making the fact he never intended to shrink the state perfectly clear to anyone who has actually been paying attention for quite some time.
Over the weekend, Tim Evans, who has been a friend of mine for about a quarter of a century, and who is now part of the Cobden Centre ruling junta (listen to a recent and relevant interview with Tim Evans about that by going here), has been ringing me and emailing me about this, which is a so-called Ten Minute Bill (I think that’s what they call it) which Douglas Carswell MP and Steve Baker MP will be presenting to the House of Commons this Wednesday, just after Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Ten Minute Bills seldom pass. But they are a chance to fly a kite, put an idea on the map, run something up the flagpole, shoot a shot across the bows (see above) of some wicked and dangerous vessel or other, etc. etc., mix in further metaphors to taste. Were this particular kite actually to be nailed legally onto the map (which it will not be for the immediately foreseeable future) it would somewhat alter the legal relationship between banks and depositors. For more about this scheme, from Steve Baker MP (whom we have had cause to notice here before), see also this.
Basically, this proposed law says that depositors should get to decide whether they still actually own what they already now think of as their own money when they hand it over to a bank, or whether their money degenerates into a mere excuse to create much more degenerate money, out of thin air. Depositors get to decide, in other words, about whether their bank deposits will be the basis of fractional reserve banking, or not. Or something. Don’t depend on me to describe this proposal accurately, or comment learnedly and in detail on its efficacy, were we to live in a parallel universe of a sort that would enable this law to pass right now.
What I do know is that Austrian Economics (or, as I prefer to think of it: good economics), which is the theoretical foundation of the Cobden Centre, ought to have massively more sway in the world than it does now. Recently I have been trying to get my head further around Austrian Economics than my head has hitherto been, and I have also been watching the Cobden Centre as it has gone methodically about its self-imposed task of transforming Britain’s and the world’s financial arrangements, thereby massively improving the economic prospects of all human beings.
I have always been impressed by Austrian Economics, ever since I first dipped into Human Action in the library of Essex University in the early 1970s. I knew rather little about Austrian Economics until lately and I still don’t know that much, beyond the fact of its superiority over bad economics. And I am now also very impressed by the Cobden Centre. What this latest parliamentary foray shows is that now Douglas Carswell MP seems to have joined the Cobden Centre network. Or maybe, what with Carswell having been an MP for some while, the Cobden Centre network has got behind Douglas Carswell MP. Whatever, and whatever his rank or title within Cobden Centre pecking order, Carswell is now a senior member of that network. Good. I hope and believe that there are many others now joining too, of comparable weight and intelligence.
I could say more about all this, much more. And I very much hope that in the weeks, months and years to come, I will. In particular I hope to explain more about just why the Cobden Centre has so far impressed me so much. But the important thing now is to get something about this up here, now, so that the Cobden Centre crowd (Tim Evans in particular) will have one more little puff of opinion to point at, to help them suggest that the intellectual wind may at least be beginning to blow in their (and my) preferred general direction.
Here is part of a press release from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the London-based free market think tank. I could not agree more with what Mark Littlewood, IEA director general, says:
“An overstaffed and overpaid public sector should be the first to face cuts in government spending. It is complete fantasy to pretend that substantial cuts are not required, and it is the public who should feel angry at being expected to support a union campaign which would see their tax money continue to be squandered.
“Public sector workers earn, on average, over £2,000 more than their private sector equivalents1. This is in addition to the more generous pensions they receive and the enormously reduced historical risk of being fired.
“A reduction in the absurdly generous terms for workers in the inefficient public sector is long overdue. It is not an attack on the poor or oppressed, it is an attack on the privileged.”
In a nutshell, much of the UK’s present economic plight can be understood in the light of how, since 1997, the public sector payroll – including all those “private sector” jobs dependent on public contracts, exploded. Pretty much most, if not all, of the big spending rises over which Gordon Brown presided were gobbled up by this enormous rise in public employment. Now of course, if you work in the public sector, you will believe, or at least want to believe, that your job is of great importance, and that those selfish Gradgrinds in Westminster and Whitehall deserve to be attacked. But the point needs to be made that the private sector, increasingly weighed down by taxes and regulations, cannot support this state of affairs; it is an absurdity, as some in the trades union movement claim, to somehow argue that cutting all these public sector jobs will somehow threaten Britain’s economic recovery. Any recovery that relies on an artificial support machine of massive public spending and employment is not a recovery worth having. And remember that what we should be aiming for is to be better off, not simply employed in pointless or destructive “jobs”. If cutting such public sector positions frees up capital for something likely to generate greater wealth overall, that’s great. The question arises, clearly, as to whether this government has the stones to say this over and over. The signs are not particularly encouraging.
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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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