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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Here is an article on how the UK-based artist, Tracy Emin, wants to leave Britain because of the upcoming new 50 per cent top income tax rate. It kicks in by the start of next April and once changes to pension and national insurance are taken into account, the effective marginal rate is nearer to 65 per cent. The tax will be on annual earnings of 150,000 pounds and above. That sounds a huge salary to someone like yours truly, but the sort of entrepreneur we need to fuel an economic recovery is likely to make that sort of money if things go well. A marginal bite of 65 per cent is likely to force such entrepreneurs to cut back on the necessary risk-taking that such ventures require. And as the article I linked to suggests, the additional revenue that officials claim will be raised will be just 2.5 billion quid – and arguably, the disincentive effect of the tax hike will reduce revenues. And never mind just the utilitarian arguments against steeply progressive taxes. As FA Hayek memorably put it in the Constitution of Liberty, there is no objective rule that would allow anyone to decide why a person who earns, say, X per cent more than the median income should pay, for example, 50 per cent on earnings, or 60 per cent, 70 per cent, or whatever. One might as well toss a coin. The “principle” of progessivism should be seen for what it is: legalised looting.
It tells you everything you need to know about Britain’s plight that people are now thinking of going to live in France because its taxes are, at least in some respects, lower. Given all the other benefits of living in France, such as the greater land area and fabulous food, the idea of heading south across the English Channel has a lot to recommend it. And I am typing these words in Malta, where the weather is – mostly – miles better than in England, although ironically we had a massive storm on Thursday evening – the same one that has hit southern Italy. But the place is economically quite lively now, judging by the sheer racket from the construction sites everywhere.
Oh, by the way, my blogging activity has been slack these past few days but I have the excuse of having done my PADI scuba course, which was successful. We haven’t yet worked out how to blog under water. Not even scuba enthusiast and internet maestro Glenn Reynolds seems able to do that.
David Cameron seems determined to not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity…
The Conservative leader also gave an interview to the Spectator magazine in which he said he would use the conference to show his party had “the grit and determination to turn the whole country around”.
But in terms of the deficit, he added: “I want to be realistic – both for what a government can achieve, but also realistic in terms of taking the country with me.” Labour has said it plans to introduce a 50p rate of tax for the highest earners – a policy Mr Cameron said he would honour.
Nevertheless, he told the Spectator he thought high marginal tax rates were “a fantastically bad idea” and if the 50p policy ultimately drove Britain’s rich to move overseas, “clearly it would be painless and advantageous to get rid of it at an early stage”.
If it is “a fantastically bad idea” then with Labour reeling around like a punch drunk boxer, why oh why not just say “Britain… are you fucked enough to be paying attention now? We are going in the WRONG DIRECTION… we will immediately repeal this tax and simply tear up every single page the fantastically bad socially and economically toxic legislation enacted over the past decade, and try to restart civil society before it completely flatlines”…
…but no…
Instead we get the usual timid drivel about being “realistic”. Why? Well it is obvious. When it comes down to it, it is really only the details that Cameron disagrees with, the basic notion of a vast profligate regulatory state is only bad when it does not have Cameron’s “safe pair of hands” (or some such similar nauseating Tory form of words) on the wheel of state.
When two working women who look after each other’s children are told they are breaking the law by doing so because they are not registered with the state to do that, the only sane and moral thing to do is to break the law and to urge as many other people as possible to do the same.
Oh yes… not that it should matter, but the two women in question are policewomen.
To look at this from a UK perspective, I have given this a lot of thought as we have a general election next year (Civil Contingencies Act permitting). Abstention or a vote for a party other than Cameron’s “Conservatives” runs a real risk of preventing the eviction of the Labour party that has done so much damage in the past 13 years. Given another 5 years they could add incalculable damage to an already impressive list.
On the other hand, a vote for the “Conservatives” would vindicate Cameron’s position, kowtowing to the supposed BBC/Guardian left of centre (quite a long way left of centre actually) “consensus”. In the short term Cameron would do less harm than another Labour government, but his success would result in future “Conservative” governments following the same policies so we would be stuck with them for the long term.
The question I asked myself was: do I think Labour can do more damage in 5 years than Cameron’s “Conservatives” can in 10, 15 or more? My answer was no, another five years of Labour is less threatening than an indefinite period of Cameron “Conservatism”. Once defeated Cameron would be dropped like the proverbial hot brick and then it will time to start working for a new leader with Conservative beliefs.
– Commenter MarkE
Here is a quick thought: in the aftermath of various financial crises – the 1997 Asian crisis (remember that one?), Long Term Capital Management (1998), various business blowups (Enron, etc), and of course, the latest excitements, one invariably hears from the Great and the Good that what we need to stop is the “box ticking mentality” when it comes to regulation. We need, so the argument goes, to rely a lot less on making sure the correct forms are filled in, and to require people in business and enforcers of laws to use more common sense. So true.
And yet. Every time a new problem emerges, what happens? You guessed it right: more box-ticking. Take the case that this blog has written about in the past few days concerning the attempt to put a quarter of all UK adults under some sort of oversight in case they come into contact with children, and other groups. What is a distinguishing feature of such a bureaucratic, and in fact dangerous, development is that it is bound to involve people answering various forms, entering various answers into a sort of database. In other words, box-ticking. So if you pass the test, then voila! you are in the clear. And so certain crooks and villains will continue to get through, because they have passed the test.
So the next time you hear a politician piously informing us that we are going to “get beyond the box-ticking approach”, do not believe them.
“We have an incoherent attitude to freedom in this country. We imagine that we value freedom above almost everything else and yet at the same time we are neurotically averse to risk. Every time something terrible happens, such as the murder of a child, the public clamours for something to be done to ensure that such a thing never happens again. Such unspeakable suffering must not have been in vain; inquiries must be held and systems must be put in place; all such risks to children must be eliminated. Yet the harsh truth is that risk is the heavy price of freedom.”
Minette Marrin.
She points out that the development – as elaborated below on this blog by Natalie Solent – will poison civil society and discourage volunteering. I think that is actually part of the idea. I have long since abandoned any notion that such developments are introduced by well-meaning but foolish people. Their intentions are to Sovietise British society, to put all law-abiding adults under a cloud, and rip up the autonomous, private spaces that make up civil society. There is a comment I remember being made by the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen: “Old Labour wanted to nationalise things; New Labour will nationalise people.”
Parents who ferry children to clubs face criminal record checks, reports the Guardian.
Parents who regularly ferry groups of children on behalf of sports or social clubs such as the Scouts will have to undergo criminal record checks — or face fines of up to £5,000, it was disclosed today.
They will fall under the scope of the government’s new vetting and barring scheme, which is aimed at stopping paedophiles getting access to children.
Other interesting quotes from the article:
A total of 11.3 million people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to register with the ISA.
All 300,000 school governors, as well as every doctor, nurse, teacher, dentist and prison officer will have to register because they come into contact with children or “vulnerable” adults at work.
And
Unlike previous lists of barred individuals, everyone registered with the agency will face continuing monitoring, with existing registrations reconsidered if new evidence is disclosed.
And
Martin Narey, the Barnardo’s chief executive and former director general of the Prison Service, said: “If the vetting and barring scheme stops just one child ending up a victim of a paedophile then it will be worth it.”
I do not know if this will actually come to pass. The proposal is massively unpopular on all sides of the political aisle, judging from the comments to this Guardian article and indeed the comments to this Daily Mail article, and this BBC Have Your Say forum. But a moribund Government can convulse in strange ways; they may not care very much about popularity.
Regular commenter here, IanB – who now gigs over at CountingCats – bashes those doctors, who, claiming to speak for all doctors, want to ban alcohol advertising.
Authortarian creeps, the lot of them. If one thinks about it, the number one addiction in the world that needs to be curbed is the habit of trying to tell grownups how to lead their lives morning, noon and night.
Inevitably, they do this in the name of protecting children, so it is not censorship, you see. How conveeeenient. Look, I like children and feel parental control and guidance is fine, but can we just remind ourselves that as kids, we managed to grow up into relatively sane creatures without being mollycoddled and protected by state censorship from adverts for beer, gin and plonk? Considering the risks that send our so-called medical “establishment” off the edge, it is a wonder we made it to adulthood at all.
There have been a flurry of articles in the press in recent days about the significant risk that in a decade’s time, possibly sooner, the UK will suffer from power blackouts as electricity generating stations fall out of use and as there is nothing – apart from some renewable energy sources such as windmills – to pick up the slack. The trouble for the Tories, of course, is that assuming they are in power by then, the blame for the disaster will fall on their shoulders, rather than on those of politicians who have chosen to play to the Green gallery by not giving the go-ahead to new power supplies, such as from nuclear energy. Of course, Mr Cameron’s own flirtation with the Green movement may come back to haunt him.
The problem, as I see it, as that not only do we not have a genuine market for energy in this country as the current setup is heavily regulated. Even if the industry were freed from worrying about complying with Green restrictions on CO2 production, there is still not enough of a genuine market to ensure that supplies keep up with demand. To say this is an urgent issue for any incoming administration next year is an understatement.
A question that I have is there anything that can be done to generate electricity on a smaller scale. rather than on the model that has operated for decades? I mean, could a group of firms join up to pay for a small nuke station, for example? (I am assuming that the security issues to that will not be a barrier).
Here is a new blog on the issue by the politician, Greg Clark. Meanwhile, Christopher Booker is in fine form on the same topic here.
“Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable.”
Nick Cohen, who loathes the alleged “comedy” programme Mock The Week as much as I do. An interesting theme, that Cohen does not explore much after raising it, is how entertainment thugs such as Frank Boyle consider it now acceptable to be extremely unpleasant about the elderly, and why this might be. Now that so many groups of humans are considered politically off-limits for jokes, only the old are left, provided they are middle class and white. Cohen muses that this trend of being vile about the old might be a sort of pent-up frustration about the rising costs of paying for an elderly population. He may have a point. But Boyle should remember that he is going to be old one day. And by the time he is in his dotage, who will remember him?
Cohen evidently loathes Mr Boyle. I rather enjoyed this piece of invective:
“Boyle is the show’s strutting cock. A gaunt, aggressive, slit-eyed Scotsman with a neurotic determination to be heard first and always, he seems to have grasped that the critics will hail him as “edgy” if he courts the porn market.”
Dearie me. Oh for the days of Dave Allen, a real comedian who understood that making people laugh is not the same as drawing blood. Well, at least I now have Family Guy to look forward to later on. Right now, Britain does not produce many funny people, in my view, with the possible exception of the cast of The Fast Show. There is a seething sort of anger and thuggery too much in evidence. I struggle sometimes to wonder where it has all come from. Explanations?
Thanks to the wonders of the internet I found out via US blogger Coyote about events in Richmond upon Thames. I used to go into Richmond every Saturday with a gaggle of other eleven year old girls to shop for three hours and eventually buy a notebook with a picture of a cat on it for seventeen and a half pence. Perhaps the place has gone downhill since I knew it: now it seems that the police of Richmond are taking valuables from unlocked cars “to drive home an anti-theft message.” It’s all right, you get your valuables back. Eventually. But you have to go round to the station to do it. You know, in some circumstances, that might be troublesome.
Can anyone versed in the laws of England explain whether this is, if not theft, at least “taking without the owner’s consent”, as the charge sheets for joyriders used to say?
On the same theme, Longrider has a story about the police in Northamptonshire impounding cars if the same car with foreign plates is seen twice more than six months apart. A Mr West writes:
I live in Spain for about seven months of the year and France for the other five. My Spanish-registered car was impounded in March after two short visits to the UK within nine months of each other.
At the start of 2009, a pilot scheme called Operation Andover started in Northamptonshire, with any foreign vehicle seen just twice, more than six months apart, being impounded without warning.
Once again, Mr West got his car back, eventually. But he had to fight not to pay a fee of several hundred pounds. As he points out, an enormously common reason for a foreign registered car being seen twice in the same place a year apart might be, not the effort to evade paying UK road tax that the police seem (pretend?) to suspect, but regular visitors coming to Britain at about the same time every year.
Reykjavik, Iceland. August 2009.
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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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