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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Tyler Cowen over at his Marginal Revolution blog lists out a load of articles about the case for privatising stuff like flood defence, and critiques of U.S. Federal efforts in that direction. He personally believes that flood defence, spectacularly breached in New Orleans, is a proper function of the state. But being the fine scholar and liberal writer he is, gives a comprehensive roll of reasons for thinking these things could be done better out of the State’s hands.
Flood defence can be presented as one of those classic “public goods” that cannot arise via the Invisible Hand of the market. Is that really the case, though? It seems to me that if the full, insurance-related costs of living in a flood zone were presented to the people either living or looking to live there, it might either encourage a lot of flood-related civil engineering defence, or for that matter discourage locating in such areas in the first place.
Anyway, hindsight is very easy, especially if you are thousands of miles away. In the meantime, I urge folk to look at the many examples of voluntary compassion flagged up by Glenn Reynolds.
What an exciting time it is to be alive: ours still is the golden age of scientific discovery, creationists and other ignoramuses notwithstanding.
–Abiola Lapite, commenting on yet more advances in genetics.
Thanks to Sean Sirrine of Objective Justice for pointing out the live audio feed from police radio in Hurricane blasted Baton Rouge.
Astonishing.
Want to see some robust news blogged from the front lines of the crisis in New Orleans? Try here.
Perhaps someone has some ideas on links to reputable sites where people can help with donations? Here is one place to start if you want to lend a hand.
This fascinating factoid courtesy of The Times’s Gabriel Rozenberg:
Tolley’s Yellow Tax Handbook is the standard professional reference on UK direct taxation. Its format has changed little for many years.
1996-1997 edition: 4,555 pages.
2005-2006 edition: 9,050 pages.
As Rozenberg points out, for income tax law to get to the size that a summary filled 4,555 pages took nearly 200 years. Boy, has the present government been busy.
Close observers of the Treasury will know that this has happened at the same time as the Inland Revenue has been piloting a glorious project that could only happen in Whitehall, the Comprehensive Tax Law rewrite. This, the first part of which is about to be enacted, is allegedly designed–this is not a joke–to simplify UK tax law without changing it.
It does serve to emphasise something that is often neglected, even by our friends at the ASI, who calculate Tax Freedom Day on the basis of the tax take. Tax burden, the cost of tax to the payer, is always greater than the actual tax he has to pay. The difference, the compliance cost, is hard to measure. But it is utterly invisible to the Civil Service, to most politicians, and most employees. To them it is someone else’s problem, if they notice at all.
But when bureaucratic treacle is poured into society’s gearboxes, everyone suffers indirectly. Compliance costs are still costs. Leaving aside the moral case against tax, they produce all the baneful economic effects of higher taxation (a split economy, advantages for tax-planners and those who can afford them, disincentive to work or invest, regulatory distortions), without putting more money into the public purse.
It is not just complication. Many of the more recent reforms (and this started under the Tories) move administrative and collection responsibilities from the government to the taxpayer or his employer, so Tolley’s doubling may well be an underestimate of the increase in compliance costs. Taxation has risen fast in Britain. But tax burden has risen, and continues to rise much faster.
David Herman, writing in Prospect, does not think the Old Media are giving way to the New Media. He just reckons that some of the Old Media are crap:
The reason the Guardian’s circulation is falling is not because of the internet or because young people have gone blog-crazy but because G2 is full of uninteresting new columnists and the op-ed page has a kind of infantile ultra-leftism that no sane person would go near. Similarly, ITV is haemorrhaging viewers not because of the challenging new multi-channel environment but because it keeps making programmes like Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. After all, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times do not seem to be losing too many readers and the viewing figures for BBC2, Channel Four and Channel Five are remarkably stable. Interestingly, it is the losers in the ratings wars who tend to be the hardcore technological determinists.
But hang on. If the numbers for some of the Old Media are “remarkably stable”, while other bits of the Old Media are “haemorrhaging” viewers and readers, does that not mean that the total amount of attention being paid to the Old Media is in decline?
It makes sense to me that the New Media should be better at supplying infantile ultra-leftism and uninteresting new columnists for free, than they are at replacing the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail. So, if infantile ultra-leftism is what you want, you no longer have to pay for it. However, free substitutes for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail will be a bit longer in catching on, not least, I should guess, because their readers are more conservative in their reading habits as well as more Conservative in their opinions. The picture that Herman sketches is entirely consistent with the notion that the New Media are losing out, starting with their youngest readers and viewers.
And when the brains of all the not-so-infantile not-so-ultra-leftists cut in, as Blue Peter loses its influence over them and as Real Life impinges, will they suddenly switch back to reading newspapers, in the form of a smartened up Guardian, or the Sunday Times, or the Daily Mail? It seems improbable. They will surely carry right on with their New Media, and the New Media will expand to accommodate them, as viewers, as readers, as writers, and in whatever other ways develop.
David Herman sounds to me like he is saying that sailing ships will sail on unscathed, and that this steam stuff will never catch on. His title is: “Am I missing something?” Yes he is.
Boris Johnson, the Tory MP and magazine editor, occasionally bugs me with his latter-day Bertie Wooster routine, which has become a bit of a self-parody, but it is hard not to like a man who writes a wonderfully clear-headed, cant-free article on China like this.
The Member for Henley-on-Thames is unimpressed by the current vogue for getting all upset about matters Chinese, whether it be terrors about Avian flu, dread of ultra-cheap clothes (low-price bras, oh the horrors!) and so forth. Boris is particularly harsh on the European Union’s bout of protectionist folly against cheap Chinese textile exports and the role of that lowlife, EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson:
It is all stark staring nonsense, and founded on the same misapprehension as Peter Mandelson’s demented decision to slap quotas on Chinese textiles, so that the mouths of the Scheldt and the Rhine are apparently silting up with 50 million pairs of cut-price Chinese trousers. It is idiocy, and not just because it is unlike Mandy to come between a British woman and her knickers.
And again:
The emergence of China and its integration into the world economy has been a major spur to growth and a deterrent to inflation. It is an unalloyed good, and it is sad to see our politicians responding with such chicken-hearted paranoia.
UPDATE: I put the wrong article in the link and have changed it. Mea culpa.
Whilst the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina will take weeks to unfold, the ‘experts’ flocked to the disaster. They squawked the usual litany of ‘climate change’ and oiloholic armageddon, overjoyed that they now had a ready-made disaster to cite as evidence. And, of course, such relish could not be served without the knowledge that their moral certainty had been strengthened by the dead Americans; corpses that will serve as an additional accusation in the long list of crimes attributed to President George Bush.
James Glassman, over at TCS, quotes some of the “environmental extremists” who wrote before they thought.
But that doesn’t stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: “Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and – now — Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”
Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany’s environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): “By neglecting environmental protection, America’s president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world’s economy.”
The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. “When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection.”
He goes on, “There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide.” In other words, thanks to Katrina, we’ll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)
Tritten is unrepentant about his article.
Yet, despite the uproar he has caused, Trittin remains unrepentant. On Wednesday, his spokesman Michael Schroeren even said that he “can’t understand … at all” why Americans are upset. Trittin’s comments “are true and he wrote what he meant.”
Perhaps he would understand if he had to hand out food parcels to the homeless or dig out corpses from the mud. But we know one universal truth about politicians from the European Union: they never dirty their hands because of their pristine ideals.
Drieu Godefridi, the Director of the Institut Hayek, looks at plans for a “new Marshall Plan” for a region of Belgium with incredulity
Politicians in Wallonia, the southern part of Belgium, think their region needs “a new Marshall Plan”. Excuse me? The Marshall Plan was designed to help Europe rise from the ashes of World War II. Surely there has not been any war in Belgium since then. So what is the point?
This plan would benefit the socialists who govern Wallonia by helping their lagging economy to recover. But to recover from what? Basically, from sixty years of socialist governance.
Truth be told, Wallonia does need an urgent boost to its economy. With an unemployment rate of 18% and almost nil growth for years, Wallonia is now on the verge of being outclassed by Poland and Slovakia, countries that started from zero in terms of their economies just 15 years ago.
This “Marshall Plan” consists of massive public investments in some parts of the Walloon economy duly selected by the government. But it will not work any better than other plans the socialists have come up with over the last three decades. (Some years ago, the same socialists said that one of their plans at that time would turn Wallonia into a “Wallifornia”).
What is comforting to learn is that the main goal of the Walloon government is now to encourage the creation of new businesses and to help to develop existing ones.
But these socialists need to understand that the creation and growth of companies are not only a question of political will. For businesses to be created and to grow, some basic conditions have to be put in place.
Probably the most important two conditions sine qua non for economic vitality currently do not exist in Wallonia: reasonable taxes and a reasonable level of regulation.
Belgian taxes are among the highest in the world, second only to France. Not every tax can be lowered by the Walloon government, but many of them could be. Unfortunately, Walloon politicians do not seem to understand the link between low taxes and economic prosperity. The Cour d’arbitrage, Belgium’s Supreme Court, recently struck down a Wallon law raising the rate of the inheritance tax at 90%.
The amount of regulation in Wallonia is ridiculously high. In every jurisdiction that it has inherited from the Belgian federal state, be it urbanism or environment, the Walloon Parliament and government have enacted several new regulations to restrict business, often developing new controls in new areas. The idea that the burden of such regulations should be measured, and compared with their merits, is foreign to the socialist elites.
That the politicians of French-speaking Belgium understand the need to create new businesses for their economy to thrive is good news. But to expect that anything like would happen without a plan that entails the drastic lowering of taxes and the abrogation of complete areas of nonsensical environmental and city planning regulations? That is just another Belgian joke.
It is very hard to know what to say, from the comfort of London, about the horror that has engulfed New Orleans and nearby places. Johnathan Pearce did his best yesterday, concentrating on what he knows about, which is the financial fall-out and the British news coverage.
But Ben Jarrell‘s situation is very different. Finding the words to describe this catastrophe is the least of his problems, because he and his wife have been personally hit by it. He added what follows as a comment on Johnathan’s posting, but his words, and his predicament, surely deserve a bit more prominence here than that.
I live in uptown New Orleans, and my wife and I evac’d Saturday morning – but as reports of the levees breaking and the city’s poor looting (I’ve heard reports they are looting on my street) I don’t expect to have much of anything left when I get home.
This global warming bullshit is ridiculous, and despite the amount of aid the US provided to the tsunami victims, I still expect the global community will pretend to care while choking back a smirk.
As for FEMA, despite my libertarian leanings, I will be standing in line for whatever I can get. My belongings are insured, but my insurance company won’t pay off on the policy until an adjuster can go in and look at the damage – which could be months.
We escaped with little more than a suitcase full of clothes, and it will be nearly impossible to function for the months it might take to get any resolution to all of this.
It is really surreal. It’s hard to think that we are homeless refugees, but that pretty much sums up our situation.
Longevity in an office is no automatic guarantee of worth. So the fact that Dr Alan Greenspan, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, has been in the post for 18 years and is shortly to step down, does not mean he must qualify for greatness. But even a sceptic of the need for central banking like me believes that Greenspan, who is nearly 80 years old, is a remarkable man. His career spans the financial crash of 1987, the recession of the early 90s, the long stock market boom, the Asian financial crisis, the Russian debt default and the rescue of hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, and of course, 9/11 and its aftermath.
I am not going to chart every nip and tuck of his tenure to state whether he was a monetary policy genius, a wise man who realised his limitations and that of his office, or just very lucky. I suspect that luck played a part but what jumps out at me, from reading articles like this, or this fine biography by Jerome Tuccille, is that Greenspan was a very wise operator indeed. America, and indeed most of the western industrialised world, has enjoyed a relatively long period of economic growth and low inflation. The United States has certainly done so. And Greenspan, being at heart a classical liberal, had the intelligence and humility to chalk up 99 percent of the credit to entrepreneurs and their employees rather than to the supposed fine arts of macro-economic policy.
I remain a sceptic, though, of the need for central banking. Greenspan has left no ideological or operative legacy that could be enshrined in doctrine and used as a clear guide to future policy. Although determined to protect price stability, he could be daring and flexible when required, far more so than the more conventionally monetarist European Central Bank. The problem though is that Greenspan’s replacement could be made in a far different mould.
America, and indeed the world, has been very lucky to have a man as wise as Greenspan at the helm. But it is surely dangerous that an economy as big as that of the United States should allow so much economic power to be held, ultimately, in the hands of one man – even if he does have very smart folk working with him. Of course, the business of “doing monetary policy” has become better over the past decades. Britain’s own central bank runs monetary policy with a studied approach unimaginable in the horror years of the 1970s when money was treated as a metaphysical abstraction. But things could go wrong. Sooner or later the men with the interest rate levers are going to make a big mistake and the results could last a while.
Meanwhile, this article scans possible successors to the clarinet-playing former disciple of Ayn Rand and gold-backed currency.
Our woes may be minor indeed compared to the hapless folks who incurred Hurricane Katrina’s ire, but Samizdata.net’s server have been intermittently gasping today under some weather-aftermath related issues.
Americans are working on nanotubes. In Germany, they are making artificial diamonds that are tougher and denser than the naturally occurring kind.
Here in Britain, in Somerset to be precise, we are harnessing, as Ananova reports, hamster power:
We’ve often wondered for what purpose exactly hamsters were put upon this earth, and now we know: to charge mobile phones.
Sixteen-year-old Peter Ash, of Somerset, finally cracked this age-old poser after his long-suffering sister complained of pet hamster Elvis scuttling away for hours during his nocturnal exercise wheel regime.
Ash told Ananova: “I thought the wheel could be made to do something useful so I connected a system of gears and a turbine.” He then patched the output to his mobe’s charger and voila! – free hamster energy at around thirty minutes’ talktime for every two hamster wheel minutes.
My thanks to Michael Jennings for emailing me the link to this important news. In his email, he noted the educational angle. Apparently this was a school project, but was not marked very highly.
Surprisingly – and considering all the current moaning about falling exam standards, etc, etc – Ash only got a “C” for this contribution to his GSCE science course and, undoubtedly, a clean-energy future for all our children. Perhaps if he’d knocked together a desktop cold fusion reactor powered by supercharged, neutron-emitting guinea pigs suspended in deuterium gas he might have earned himself an “A”.
To be a bit more serious, I think the real story here is not just a new way to get power, but the fact that nowadays a little bit of power can go a whole lot further than it used to. Hamsters have long had it in them to crank out a dribble of electricity. What is new here, surely, is the “mobe” which makes such good use of it.
Over the weekend, Bill Oddie fronted a TV show about dinosaurs, in which, in order to learn how fast dinosaurs could run, an ostrich called Sharon was asked to run on an exercise machine. She apparently enjoyed doing this a lot. (The point was that ostriches have similar legs to what dinosaurs used to have. Work out how fast and for how long ostriches can run, with their legs, and you can calculate how fast and for how long the dinosaurs could run.) Maybe Sharon and her sisters and brothers could get jobs generating electricity.
Maybe gymnasia could double up as places where you can recharge your phone. By the sweat of your brow, I mean. Not just by handing it in at the desk and collecting it later. That way, you earn the right to spout rubbish over it to your idiot friends.
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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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