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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Quite why so many people write about Nelson Mandela in such a hagiographic manner baffles me. This is a man who is going out of his way to give aid and succor to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of murdering 270 people in the air and on the ground when he blew up a Pan Am Jumbo Jet full of people over Lockerbie, Scotland.
One of the angry relatives, who lost their 19 year old daughter, asks:
If Mr Mandela is truly concerned about the conditions Megrahi is suffering, then perhaps he should visit and represent other convicts in Britain’s prisons who are serving their sentence for their crimes in worse conditions than Megrahi will ever have to experience.
Back when I was at school, I reall seeing some people wearing tee-shirts saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’… Now whilst I abominated the apartheid regime in South Africa, it seemed to me that replacing white tyranny with the ANC was just going to be a case of changing not that country’s tyranny but merely that tyranny’s colour. I also happen to recall seeing other folks, ‘Young Conservatives’, in the 1980’s wearing a tee shirt which said ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’… hmmm…
Perhaps marketing those tee-shirts again might be a nice business opportunity!
Better late than never?
Patrick Crozier sees that the railways are not immune to the same laws of supply and demand as everyone else
The news that the government is considering removing rail fare controls has, in media parlance “raised fears” of a massive increase in prices.
For once the fear is the right word. Allowing railway companies the freedom to set their own fares does seem scary. The man waiting for the 08:22 has to get to work. For him there is, to all intents and purposes, only one way of getting to work – the train. There is no choice. Buying railway tickets is not like buying bars of chocolate.
So, there must be controls, right? Wrong. Fare controls are amongst the most damaging forms of regulation that governments can impose on a railway. Here, there were very few controls and very few complaints until the 1920s. London and its railways expanded in tandem bringing suburbia to the masses, all at an affordable price. In the 1920s the state imposed controls on freight charges. Railway profits went for a Burton. Then, during the Second World War, the government froze fares while inflation let rip. The railways emerged in a parlous state, in dire need of a major overhaul. During nationalisation fares were constantly being held down while the industry gradually declined. It is significant, that British Rail’s happiest time was during the 1980s when it was allowed to increase fares more or less at will. Incidentally, the chief reason why Japanese trains are so overcrowded is, once again, state-imposed fare control.
But what of the man on the 08:22? What’s going to happen to him when he’s left to the tender mercies of the market? Well, the bad news is that, intitially at least, his fares are going to go up. Quite a lot in fact.
The interesting thing is what happens next. If fares are high and are kept high and passengers see no improvement in service they will start to make different arrangements. Some will move to somehere near a cheaper railway. Others will change jobs to somewhere nearer where they live. Slowly but surely the railway will start to lose revenue.
At this point the market starts to come into its own. Sure, some railways will exhibit a couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude, put up the fares, keep them high and do nothing in return but their profits will decline. But others will take an entirely different approach. They will use the price signal to improve quantity and quality. They will introduce lower fares for those travelling before the peak. They will introduce automatic fare reductions in cases of poor punctuality. They will increase capacity and they will spruce up stations (where they don’t rebuild them). They will do this because higher fares will tell them that there is a market out there waiting to be satisfied and satisfied markets mean nice, fat pay cheques.
When fares are set free the man on the 08:22 will see a step change in the quality of the service. It won’t happen at once (railways are not like that) and it won’t be without pain, but it will happen.
The Daily Telegraph reports today that a farmer who was accused of shooting intruders at his home has been acquitted. Frederick Hemstock, who had claimed he intended to fire the gun in the air to frighten two intruders, has been cleared of deliberately shooting one of them.
The judge in the case also criticised the police for refusing to answer an emergency call made by the defendant’s wife. Why is anyone surprised? Dialing 999 is now the equivalent of playing the National Lottery.
Of course, if Mr. Hemstock had deliberately shot the intruder, then he still would not have been guilty in my eyes if he could have been shown to prove self-defence. But as we sadly know, self-defence is the Number One crime in this country. Meanwhile, PC Plod has all those speeding CCTV cameras to attend to…
Last night (Thursday July 11th) I attended a lecture organised by the Adam Smith Institute (note that their website now has no “uk” at the end – it’s just “www.adamsmith.org”), and given by former Chief Schools Inspector Chris Woodhead. It was a strange occasion, in some ways extremely encouraging and in others somewhat frustrating.
Woodhead patiently explained why, in his very well informed opinion, state education, academic improvements are because the exams are getting easier. The national curriculum, which he said he used to support, has allowed real subjects to be replaced by nonsense subjects, and he now thinks it should be scrapped.
Nor, said Woodhead, will the present government’s various “initiatives” make any difference. Lowering class sizes has had little impact in the USA. Parents don’t want specialist schools, they just want good schools which are good at everything that matters. Bringing in “private sector management” won’t help if the managers aren’t allowed to sack any of the existing teachers.
So, having spent most of his career working for the “top down” (his own oft-repeated phrase) state education system, he now wants the freely choosing citizenry rather than state hirelings and bureaucrats to make the key decisions about education.
Well, good. And good on the Adam Smith Institute for fixing it for Woodhead to say such things. But I felt about it rather as I did about high-level (and hence well paid) “critics” of the Soviet empire, at the time when that was also falling apart. Could you not have arrived at some of these conclusions a little sooner? And some of Woodhead’s proposed reforms were decidedly naïve. Education vouchers? He said that the entire state education machine, and especially the unions (“the blob”), is unanimously against vouchers. Indeed. So might not something a little more cunning, if only because more cunningly worded, be preferable? There was also the suspicion that Woodhead’s own inability to get his own way from his former position of supposed power, and the general unpleasantness he suffered from the many and various enemies he accumulated within the system, had a lot to do with his conversion. Sour grapes in other words. But one shouldn’t carp too much. It will certainly make a difference that a major ed-celeb has come out in favour of moving education in a much more free market direction. And besides, what better way could there be to learn about the horrors of the politicised and state-centralised provision of education than by experiencing and observing these horrors at first hand and face to face? Better late than never.
Another reservation that many libertarians would have felt (and which one questioner stated out loud during the Q&A session) concerned the fact that Woodhead’s proposals were all about parental choice, and about the reestablishment of old-fashioned education and old-fashioned academic standards. The Woodhead plan was simply that the children should be told to do different things by different people. But what of the children’s own wishes? What of their freedom?
This bothers me less (although Brian’s Education Blog may change my mind about this!). First, Woodhead has a point about the value of basic skills, especially of the simple three Rs variety. Learning to read and write and add up is a far better basis for individual freedom than being kidnapped and made to muck about with plasticene, or to be taught literacy and numeracy very badly.
And second, it seems to me that in practice children can have a huge influence over the choices that parents supposedly make on their behalf, far more than they could ever hope to influence the state. Eagerness to follow Alternative Plan B and severe temper tantrums and adolescent bolshiness directed at Parental Plan A means that Plan A in practice stands little chance of being followed, no matter how certain parents may feel about its superiority. That so many children get bossed by their parents is because most children are either unthinkingly obedient, or else only bolshy. Children lack freedom, that is to say, not because they are in a prison, but because they themselves give insufficient thought to alternatives.
The greatest achievement, in narrow political terms anyway, of the present Labour government is to have convinced large swathes of the middle class that it has nothing to fear from Labour. Certainly, the decision taken early on to make the Bank of England independent and set interest rates was a masterstroke. Pretty much every other decision, though, has been in the wrong direction, and after the usual early honeymoon period, doubts are setting in.
In a cogently argued piece for the right-leaning Daily Telegraph, columnist Daniel Johnson subjects the reign of UK finance minister Gordon Brown to a thorough bashing. At the core of the problem is Brown’s massive tax increases, which, coupled with a horrendously complex welfare benefits system, is fostering a corrosive dependency culture while at the same time retarding economic growth. For several years while world markets boomed it was possible for Brown to get away with the reputation of the ‘canny Scot’ who would take no risks with the economy. But his mania for new tax rises and sundry gimmicks, coupled with a barely concealed dislike of the middle class, is starting to get noticed.
The real question now is whether the opposition Conservative Party can make any gains from this. Judged by the complete lack of tax-cutting rhetoric from the Tories, they don’t look like making progress any time soon.
It was a old con trick in London’s East End. A street urchin would ‘hobble’ somebody’s parked car (usually by crawling under and pulling the connectors from the starter motor) and while the stricken owner was wondering how they were going to get home that night, up would pop said urchin, now as Good Samaritan, who would offer to get them going again…in return for a modest fee.
Those motorists were the lucky ones. The rest of us have been forced to hand over sums that are far from modest to urchins that we actually elect and as a result of an almost identical modus operandi.
Since HM government has dedicated much of the last 50 years to sucking every last drop of blood from our veins and is now shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the simple desire to save for one’s retirement is complex and forbidding. Of course it is. Since every successive Finance Act introduces new mechanisms for wealth-grabbing, financial service providers have had to twist and contort like Rumanian gymnasts in order to keep shirts on their customers backs. Just as an anti-body bombarded by viruses develops an ever-more impressive arsenal of chemical defences in order to stay one-step ahead.
The result is a business of pensions and savings that is so brain-gougingly complicated that many professional accountants and bankers admit that they no longer understand it.
So now the grift. HM government comes to the rescue on it’s White…sorry, Diverse Charger to save us poor peons from drowning in a sea of pure gobbledegook. Hooray for the government!!
Tom Burroughes has a dream for the government, I have a message: F*ck off and leave us alone. We’ll build our wealth quite nicely without you.
Heard on the radio news so no link, but a 39 year-old man has been shot dead on the doorstep of his East London home in front of his three children.
Thus far, the killing appears to be motiveless.
With the round of tax increases announced in the last budget, HM Government reached the top of the Laffer Curve i.e. the Chancellor has now looted as much money as he viably can from the British taxpayer. If he wants more, he will have to get himself a drill and start going after their gold fillings.
According to a depressingly large number of people, we in Blighty should all now be happier, healthier, better educated, more cultivated and, above all, kinder and more caring.
But we’re not. Certainly those who work in the public sector are not because I detect that the first shot in a ‘War of the Spoils’ has been fired by Local Government unions who have announced a series of nationwide strikes to commence later this month.
“If the stoppage goes ahead on 17 July it will be the first national council workers’ strike since the 1979 Winter of Discontent.
If this is the start of a massive, bitter and chaotic bun-fight for booty in the public sector, then I give all our readers fair warning that they can expect lots of nauseatingly smug we-told-you-so type postings (mostly from me).
Paul Marks has also been following what Tory great white hope Oliver Letwin has been saying… and Paul sees that Letwin is still trapped within the statist meta-context that ultimately undermines even the best intentions.
Having read Antoine Clarke‘s recent Samizdata article If the Conservatives have a Future… (and read a review by Dr. Gabb) I wish I had been at the Oliver Letwin meeting. However, I have two concerns about Dr. Letwin.
Firstly in all the interviews I have heard Dr. Letwin give (and I have heard many interviews – the most recent only a couple of days ago) his devotion to the ‘public services’ shines through.
It is simply not true that local control will make such ‘public services’ as health and education work. For example, my fellow inhabitants of Kettering, Northamptonshire have no more influence over the work of Kettering Borough Council than they do over the work of Whitehall – nor will some administrative reorganization change this. The only way ‘local control’ is good is if it financed by local taxation – then people can ‘vote with their feet’ by going to the area with the lowest taxes (ditto regulations).
Nor will “getting civil society involved” help matters – as this tends to mean either Blair government style ‘public-private partnerships’ (i.e. sleaze – with the taxpayers being robbed even more than they are by the state acting alone), or George W. Bush style government subsidies for such things as churches and private charities (such ‘help’ can only corrupt the institutions of civil society).
If the state must exist (and human beings of good will can argue well on both sides of this question) then the ‘wall of separation’ between the state and civil society must be maintained – any mixing of the two leads inevitably to corruption. The ‘public services’ CAN NOT work – if Dr. Letwin feels he can not say that (because the voters demand that they work) then he should remain silent. I do not know what the voters will accept – but I do know that telling them pleasing stories is unwise (as when the promises can not be kept the voters will be angry).
My other concern about Dr. Letwin is that he does not seem to understand the true nature of the economy. The economy is not basically sound with a few nasty problems. No – the economy is basically unsound.
Firstly the economy is based on a fiat money credit bubble. Some people (such as Antoine Clarke) may well be very bored by me banging about this so I will keep things short. The basic economic structure of Britain and all the main Western nations is in a state similar to (if not worse than) 1929. It is true that at least we have less chance of beggar-thy-neighbour tariff wars today – but the credit-money bubble must burst (and the collapse will be very bad).
Secondly the Welfare State ‘entitlement programs’ of the Western World continue to grow. Even without a credit-money collapse these Welfare State programs would bankrupt all Western nations (including the United States). As it is the Welfare State will collapse when the credit-money bubble bursts.
Dr. Letwin and the rest of the ‘Front Bench’ of the Conservative and Unionist Party give no sign of understanding any of the above. Their policy concerns are roughly of the same order as being concerned with the lay out of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Paul Marks
I don’t believe that the Conservative Party has a future. I think most of its members will either go away or pass away over the next ten years. I also reckon that Labour will win the next election (perhaps with a new leader), which will be extremely upsetting for many of the current generation of Conservative politicians.
However, Oliver Letwin MP, at last night’s Adam Smith Lecture, offered the sort of evidence, which if sustained over the next three years, could yet force me to change my mind. It is also an exception to my rule never to listen to political speeches, when trying to predict the future.
But then Mr Letwin is no ordinary politician. His speech was Sustainability and society. He started by setting the infamous Mrs Thatcher remark “there is no such thing as society” into its context and then announced that the rest of what he was going to say was consistent with her full statement.
He then listed four main themes and stuck to them. These were:
- Society is irreducibly complex
- Simplistic targets can be exceptionally destructive
- Crude intervention damages natural regeneration
- Natural systems are able to absorb limited disruption, then degrade suddenly and irreversibly
Especially cute was the use of the ecosystem of the tropical rainforest to illustrate the harm that social engineers can inflict on society. Mr Letwin also described the damage caused by spin-initiatives in the National Health Service and housing estates in the manner of a don discussing the pernicious effects of Byzantine tax policies. Mr Letwin was precisely such a don dissecting Marxist philosophy before entering think-tanks and politics. The deliberate refusal to make the attack emotional or personal was all the more powerful. Mr Letwin didn’t spell out every detail. I figured out for myself that the last point could be a description of the accelerating shambles of the railway, state health system and of course the criminal justice system.
I could have written everything Mr Letwin said on the contrast between local decision making being less bad than remote decision making.
He then answered questions openly, without being afraid to disagree.
Mr Letwin responded to the fear that local tyrants would replace remote bureaucracies. Local tyrants are easier to persuade of the error of their ways or to remove if necessary. Also the harm would be inflicted on fewer people at a time, and mistakes could be rectified quicker.
Mr Letwin also outlined his ideas for a ‘Freedom Audit’ for new legislation. This would at least mean that politicians and civil servants would have to invent ingenious excuses why the most oppressive price of legislation was really liberating. This would force the issue of freedom to be raised before a law was rushed through Parliament.
He also gave his case for drug criminalisation in answer to a Cambridge University student who asked what ingenious excuse Mr Letwin could find for explaining that drug prohibition was in fact liberation. Mr Letwin took that point on the chin and admitted that drug criminalisation was a violation of liberty and “inconsistent with the libertarian position”. He defended this on the grounds that for an individual to destroy his intellect was something that should not be allowed. He also claimed that it would be inconsistent to legalise some drugs and not others (True!). But in his view the total legalisation would cause the collapse of civilisation as we know it. However, he did add that cannabis might not be properly categorised as a drug, which he considered a technical issue.
There are three problems for Mr Letwin’s approach (which I suspect he understands full-well). One is that Labour could steal any or all of his actual proposals. To his credit Mr Letwin appears content with this: he would prefer to be in opposition with the government doing the right thing than in government doing the wrong thing. The other is that a lot of the centralisation he talks about was pushed through by his own party: at some stage he will have to say “We were wrong”, it is unclear whether Mr Letwin will be allowed to say it. Finally, will Mr Letwin’s colleagues have the intellectual integrity to keep to this approach, or will they quickly lose their nerve.
Already Sean Gabb is admitting that he may have to change his tactics towards the Conservative Party. If Mr Letwin can silence our separate criticisms, they’re doing something right.
I was asked by someone at the reception afterwards if I thought Mr Letwin would swing young voters to back the Tories. On that performance I said “No, but they would have been intrigued…”
I wonder what it is that motivates politicians and bureaucrats to dream up new schemes to strangle free enterprise? That they are wrong goes without saying but are they driven by a genuine (if misguided) belief that they are helping to make the world a better place or are they spiteful and envious ghouls who pursue power so they they can wreak their vengeance on those who are manifestly better then them?
Increasingly, I take the latter view, reinforced by these kind of reports from the Spectator on the new European Pressure Equipment Directive:
“Under the directive, all companies which manufacture boilers will be obliged to nominate a ‘notified body’ —in practice, one of several insurance companies which have been licensed for the task — which will then have the power to conduct an initial inspection costing several thousand pounds, and unlimited follow-up inspections costing the company £700 per day.
Take that, you wealth-creating bastards!! And, for the little guys, a double-whammy. In fact, a death-whammy:
“Large engineering firms will be able to absorb the costs, but for the likes of Ian Stock, whose Carmarthen-based company Dragon Boilers Ltd makes copper boilers for model railway enthusiasts, it could spell ruin. ‘There is no limit to how often the notified body could come and inspect me,’ he says. ‘Any time it can say to itself, “We’re short of money, let’s make a trip to Dragon Boilers.”
Poor Mr.Stock. Still, at least he’s got the message in no uncertain terms. Let us hope he sees fit to spread it.
Boris Johnson, Conservative MP and editor of the weekly British magazine, The Spectator, delivers a furious serve down the baseline to the neo-mercantilists at the Guardian newspaper. He says that organ is getting all worked up about how tennis balls are produced by downtrodden workers in the Third World and made out of precious materials. (I cannot find a link to the story). What do the Guardianistas imagine workers making such things would be doing otherwise? Studying for MBAs? Writing software? Suffice to say that Boris subjects the Guardian’s flat-earth analysis to a superb take-down. Strikes me that the Member for Henley should get his own blog. Boris, come and join the party. We need more British bloggers.
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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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