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]
|
Are nation states more trustworthy now than in previous times? I am of course asking a rhetorical question. No, they are not more, or less, trustworthy. People, in particular the sort of people who seek political power or to in some way wield the authority of the state, are essentially the same sort of people who have always sought such things.
And so, when the Scottish state tells us that the venerable prohibitions against double jeopardy, being put on trial more than once for the same crime, must be abolished due to improvements in methods of forensic science, they are actually saying “we, the state, can be trusted with the power to just shuffle the deck and try again if we do not like the outcome of a criminal trial because of course our motives could never be anything less than a relentless search for truth and justice, right?”…
That is in actually what they are saying, because DNA cannot possibly be planted or falsified and our priestly class, sorry, I mean scientific experts are always simply concerned with the dispassionate facts (like say, the good folks at the CRU).
What could possibly go wrong with being able to keep retrying people until the “right” result is gained, eh?
So Baron Pearson of Rannoch has become the new leader of UKIP. I can only hope that he has a better grasp of real economics than Nigel Farage, who although he was very sound on a great many issues, was clueless in that respect in that he basically was offering more of the same deranged Keynesian bollocks being proffered by both the main parties. Well we shall see I suppose.
I once heard a very good pro free-trade diatribe by Pearson some years back which is an encouraging sign and his support of Geert Wilders on the Fitna issue was glorious and suggests he may well be dependable on civil liberties.
Alice Thompson is a bit of an economic dunce, isn’t she?
“Their private polling shows that the public loathe bankers more than politicians, so the Conservatives are desperate to disassociate themselves from the City. Voters are furious that the gap between the yachts and have-nots has grown rather than diminished in the past few months. While City high-flyers are once again buying £10,000 stocking fillers, eBay crashed last weekend under the weight of people trying to sell goods to get extra cash for Christmas. The more distance the Tories can put between themselves and the City the better. Even Boris Johnson, always a reliable guide to the prevailing political wind, has dumped his “monstrous” pinstriped friends. Instead, the Tories are courting the CBI and business, emphasising tax cuts for companies and promising to be “unashamedly pro-enterprise”. The message is clear: real businesses matter; the City doesn’t.”
Let’s unpack this. I read the entire, dreadful piece and it occured to me that Ms Thompson is wedded to the notion that if an activity – such as hedge fund arbitrage – cannot be immediately explained in terms of some physical good or easily understood service – like laundry – then it must be suspect in some way. She does not necessarily endorse all of the anti-market sentiment expressed by others she quotes in her article, but the overall tone is unmistakable. It is also a reminder that there is much hostility to banking, finance and the market on parts of what I might call the Right as among the Left, crude though such terms are in terms of political mapping.
Of course, it is true that the size of the financial services industry has been arguably swelled beyond what is healthy by decades of ultra-low interest rates, which have caused an increasingly manic hunt for yield, leading to the whole alphabet soup of acronym products associated with the credit crunch. But that is not the point that Ms Thompson is making. She seems to be saying that banking per se, when set against other kinds of economic activity, is wrong or morally dubious, and that we’d be better off without it. But whether “we” (who?) would be “better off” with a different mix of economic activities is something of a subjective judgement, not something that can be modelled according to some sort of utilitarian calculus. For instance, should banking make up 5%, 10%, or 20% of an economy’s gross domestic product? How much is too big or too small? Surely, in a proper market without artificial barriers to entry and without the distortions of central bank rates, regulations and the like, the size of banking as a sector will vary depending on the shifting sands of consumer preferences. That is all.
I am not suggesting that Ms Thompson take in all these points in a brief column for a newspaper, even if she had a clue about economics. But frankly, when I read yet another version of the centuries-old slur against speculators and “middlemen”, even if dressed up in the slightly “gosh how awful” tones of a rightwing female columnist, I think it is necessary to kick the offending author in a sensitive part of the anatomy. If Britain loses its edge in financial services due to a rash of bad legislation, heavy taxes and the rest, this nation is in trouble. The exodus is already well under way.
After the exposure and the lies, the excuses and the ‘business as usual’ attitude, we are told that only four broke the law. Only four were stupid enough to actually get caught. The rest get slapped wrists or a golden handshake, happy wanking their golden pay-off from the backs of the taxpayer, now viewed as a bottomless treasury for Labour’s ballot fund.
This Parliament is a sump, a slough, a slurry pit which does not even have the decency to develop an upper crust to disguise its foulness. You cannot drain this away as the swine have developed a taste for speculation, peculation and entitlement. And worse than the poor suckers of dole who know no better, their entitlement is a result of greed, not Special Brew.
How can an electorate inoculate ourselves from those who would wield power? In days past, this was the result of a tie: the contractual ties between governed and governor enriched by the fear of riot, the joy of bribery and an indecent sense of superiority over the occasional war: such are the advantages of a rising power. Even thirty years ago, our greatest traitor, Heath, was tested and sent packing when he had the temerity to ask “Who governs Britain?”
That crisis of governance may be more important than we know. Fifteen years of turbulence may have taught some that it is better to dilute the power of the demos, and transmute rage to apathy, gold to lead. And what better vehicle for this inoculation arose than the European Union: a new structure that observed the norms and the forms, but rendered each voter more impotent than a castrati in a Nevada brothel.
So when I say “only four?” I know that their fellow politicians will look on them as sacrificial lambs, thrown to wolves now and rescued later through sympathetic parole boards and glowing character references from fellow peers.
I first wondered whether this story was a spoof, but it appears not to be so.
I wonder what Patri Friedman, moving light in the Seasteading Institute and an advocate of the idea of creating new nations, makes of this story.
Sealand is one of the longest-running attempts to create a micro-state. It is off the Suffolk coast, based on an old anti-aircraft tower. The article, by the local newspaper in the East Anglian region, contains a nice photo of the place.
I suspect that if Sealand ever provided services – such as totally encrypted financial service facilities – then a tax-hungry UK would not demur at sending over a frigate to shut the place down. But the guy who set up this place has been known to defend his territory vigorously. For a supposed old eccentric, he’s held out remarkably well.
Yet another example of the vileness of the culture which pervades the management of the public sector…
Paramedics fighting to save a nine-year-old road accident victim were told rigid rest-break regulations meant the closest crew could not be called upon for back-up. Lifesavers at a crash scene in Upton were told they would have to wait for a crew nearly 20 minutes away because paramedics in Poole still had a few minutes left on their break.
Ambulance staff treating little Bethany Dibbs then called Poole ambulance station directly. A second crew abandoned their break and raced to Sandy Lane, arriving just five minutes after their colleagues […] But the South Western Ambulance Service Trust is standing by its decision. A spokesperson said the trust took its statutory health and safety duties for all staff very seriously.
But this is also an example of the fact civil society still has at least some life left in it, because the paramedics on the scene said “screw it” and just called the people they needed directly themselves… and of course those lads came immediately, teacup in hand no doubt, regardless of the rules and regulations that the South Western Ambulance Service Trust and the union think are so damn important.
[via Reason]
This comment on the current Speaker, of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who is generally regarded by many people as a slimeball of the first order:
“If you feel that is an exaggeration, look what they did when last entrusted with what was potentially a great reforming measure – the chance to elect a new Speaker to replace the compromised and incapable man we must learn to call Lord Martin. They ended up choosing the legislature’s equivalent of Donald Duck, not because they believed he might step out of his cartoon one day and restore order to a profoundly damaged but vital institution, but because it would upset the Tory party. That is how serious the present parliamentary majority is about restoring the credibility of the Commons. And as we read endless stories about the new Speaker’s lavish refurbishments of his apartments, the size of his television, his wife’s political stunts and his decision not to dress properly for the State Opening, the full force of what a pointless little creep he is, and how he squats vacuously in one of the great positions of state, is brought home to us.”
There is a passage in F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom where the great man writes about how “the worst get on top” in political systems where there are few restraints on power. Mr Bercow validates that theory most admirably.
Oh, and Brian Micklethwait, like me, has met Bercow. He’s not a fan.
Via the Cobden Centre, a relatively new think tank that focuses on banking and money from the “Austrian” point of view, here is a nice article by James Tyler. He sets out how to avoid past problems and what to do about banking and money.
I still think that fractional reserve banking, so long as it is openly stated and so long as legal tender laws are scrapped, is not necessarily an evil. If a person deposits money in an FRB that advertises itself as such and if he takes out commercial insurance to cover a potential disaster, then in a free market based on consent, I am not sure that FRB should be made illegal. For sure, a bank that claimed to be a 100% reserve bank that was in fact, not fully covered, should be prosecuted for running a fraudulent business. But that is simply a case of obtaining money by deception, an offence covered in existing law.
As is so often the case, I think that some of our current woes could be ameliorated, if not solved, if we enforced the basic Common Law of this realm rather than endlessly creating new rules instead. But then I guess that would give politicians nothing much to do, would it?
The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be of the view that somewhere in the Bible, it says “take the wealth of others by force and give it to people best able to work the political system”. Just another statist thug, but then we already knew that.
And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?
John Osimek reports for The Register:
The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.
The questionnaire – or “School Entry Wellbeing Review” – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a “Health Record” on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.
The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child “often lies or cheats”: whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. […]
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and media columnist, has this to say about the new top income tax rate of 50 per cent, due to take effect from next April. He is pretty blunt:
So it is utterly tragic, at the end of the first decade of this century, that we are back in the hands of a government whose mindset seems frozen in the wastes of the 1970s. If Gordon Brown remains in power – and perhaps even if he does not – Britain’s top rate of tax will soar far above that of our most important global competitors. China, Germany and Australia are on 45 per cent maximum; Italy is on 43 per cent; Ireland on 41 per cent; France on 40 per cent; and America is on 35 per cent.
I would not mind so much if I thought this expedient was temporary, or that it would work. If the 50p tax was going to plug the hole in the nation’s finances, then it might be a good thing, and it would be right that the rich should pay a larger share. But even on the Government’s figures it is only due to raise £2.5 billion of the £700 billion required – and those estimates may be wildly optimistic. This tax is predicted to drive away at least 25,000 people; it may simply encourage more avoidance; it may actually cost money, not bring it in.
As he says, many of those whose lives are shaped by the shrivelled, dog-in-the-manger philosophy of collectivism will not give a damn. So what, they will say? And in the Daily Telegraph article that Boris Johnson writes, you can read a goodly number of such dismissive comments, from the sort of cretins – I use the word without apology – who seem driven more by hatred of the rich than by a serious desire to improve conditions generally.
But what interests me in the politics of this is how emphatic Mr Johnson is in saying what a disaster the top rate will be. He’s absolutely right, of course, and it is heartening that a senior figure from the opposition Conservatives should say so. I have my problems with Mr Johnson – he’s certainly no consistent advocate of small government – but by goodness, it is good that he is making this point and in this emphatic way. No doubt Mr Johnson will be told by the various unlovely allies of David Cameron to shut up, to not be “difficult”. (The same thing happened when he mentioned the Tory promise to hold a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty). Well, to hell with that.
It appears that an incoming Tory – or BlueLabour – government will not reverse this new, top rate in the first budget after any election. That would be a gross mistake. I hope Mr Johnson does not shut up on this issue. Of course, he also has to practice what he preaches in his own job.
|
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.
|
