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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As regular Samizdata readers will know, many of the authors here have been enthralled by the development of a nascent commercial space flight industry, given a vital kick-start by the X-Prize and demonstrated in thrilling fashion by Bert Rutan’s Space Ship One.
As I said at the time, the cultural Luddites in our midst will mock, but ventures like this inspire the open-minded, scientifically curious and plain ornery speed freaks like yours truly. They show that the boundaries we accept as given are anything but. The demonstration that private enterprise can produce real results in space flight is an important one, and I reckon that a growing competitive market in this area should help bring long-term costs down and free the industry from the dead hand of NASA and other state institutions with multi-billion budgets and limited visions.
In the years leading up to the first phase of manned space flight, there was a good deal of fiction pointing to some of the ideas and developments which later translated into fact. Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and Poul Anderson are among those who spring to mind. But I had not come across a lot of recent fiction (ie, written in the past 20 years) which had played with ideas of how space flight would be borne on the wings of buccaneering free market capitalism. Well, in the past couple of years, I came across two good books, one I regard as solid, if perhaps a little wooden in its style, and another which simply blew me away with its sweep, drama and all-round believability. The first is Firestar, by Michael Flynn and the second, and in my view better, book, is Kings of the High Frontier, by Victor Koman. The Koman book is my favourite.
What is depressing, given the present amount of crud sold in bookshops these days, is that Koman’s book is not easily available. The publishers thought fit to produce a small run. Considering the revival of interest in space flight which I detect at the moment, and the deeds of the SSI flight, this book deserves a bigger audience. I have contacted the publishers to make this very point. Perhaps if they don’t want to produce more, then another publisher with more flair will take up the challenge. Screw Harry Potter and nonsense about wizards – this is the real stuff of real, achievable adventure.
Attentive libertarians know, of course, that statists routinely lie in the pursuit of their objectives. A couple of revealing posts show how they lie about economic reality in pursuit of a multitude of policies that boil down to the state taking your stuff and giving it to others via various redistribution schemes, just as the need for redistribution is left on the dust-heap of history.
First, Mickey Kaus takes long-time lefty and temporary NYT columnist Barbara Ehrenreich to task for falsely claiming that it is impossible for a single mom to escape poverty by marrying a productive blue collar worker (implying that we therefor need greater transfers of your wealth to single moms and blue collar workers). The annoying facts:
Even at the current minimum wage, a full-time worker earns $10,700 a year and an Earned Income Tax Credit of $2,500 (three person family) to $4,200 (four person family). Add in $4000-5,000 of food stamps and subsidized Medicaid or CHIP health care for the children, and you’re well above the poverty line even with a single breadwinner and a stay-at-home mom.
Next, Arnold Kling posts more annoying facts to rebut the commonly heard mantra from the redistributionists that wage earners have lost ground since the ’70s. This is, of course, obviously and intuitively absurd, but its nice to have some numbers. While most of the essay defies excerpt, one of the long-term trends is particularly striking:
One of the most important trends of the past century is the reduction in the average work week. Contrary to another popular myth, Americans are working much less than they used to. Fogel writes:
“in 1890, retirement was a rare phenomenon. Virtually all workers died while still in the labor force. Today, half of those in the labor force, supported by generous pensions, retire in their fifties.”
Furthermore, Americans work many fewer days than they did a century ago. Using as a benchmark a 365 day work-year, Fogel calculates that in 1880 on average male household head worked 8.5 hours per day, but only 4.7 hours per day in 1995. With less time spent working and somewhat better health, total leisure available has more than tripled, from 1.8 hours per day to 5.8 hours per day.
The policy implications should be obvious: Wealth frees a society from any need for the state to mandate minimally acceptable outcomes (to insure that no one starves or freezes), and so a wealthy society should be able to dispense with the redistributionist state.
However, the incredible wealth generated by the American economy has had the opposite effect, because people with more disposable income are not nearly as sensitive to taxation. One of the many things they can afford more of, in short, is taxes. With no shortage of people willing to take your money and spend it as they see fit, taxes and redistribution have increased just as any arguable need for them has all but disappeared. In the final irony, the most enormous wealth transfer scheme of all (Social Security and Medicare) transfer money from the poorest segment of society (wage earners) to the wealthiest (the elderly).
Natalie’s post below, referencing ‘new age travellers’ reminded me of something I saw on TV the other night: One of the reality TV programmes littering the Channel 4 schedule is Wife Swap. This features two families of contrasting lifestyles swapping wives for a couple of weeks. This week saw unabashed ‘consumerist’ Joanna exchange with soi-disant ‘eco-warrior’, Emily.
The violent disagreements frequently showcased in this series were notable by their absence but a source of intense irritation for me was the smug way that Emily’s family presumed to lecture Joanna’s family about the ‘unsustainability’ of their ‘consumerist’ lifestyle. This was to be set in contrast to the supposedly sustainable, humble way of life enjoyed by the environmentally friendly family. Yet it seemed clear to me that it was the lifestyle of the latter which was truly unsustainable. After all, this particular eco-family, eke out an idyllic idle existence in their forest house… courtesy of state benefits!
If all of us capitalists downed our tools to live in the woods and embrace the eco-lifestyle there would be nobody paying the taxes which fund these ‘alternative’ lifestyles, nor indeed would there be an economy to provide all those things you can’t just grow. Whatever chance a self-supporting eco-warrior has of convincing me of the superiority of that lifestyle, when one attempts to do so from a position of state-funded idleness, the proper reaction is derision.
The principal reason this is worth noting is that guilty consumerists prove notoriously receptive to the kind of nonsense peddled by the likes of Emily, probably imagine that the greater virtue lies in the faux-sustainable lifestyle and provide insufficient defense of the capitalism which actually ‘sustains’ all of us.
Unless he was lying on national television again, or changes his mind like he did several times over the Maastricht Treaty, Saddam Hussein’s best chum has announced that the French (and colonies) will be given a chance to vote on the proposed European Union constitution.
Lucky, we know all the dirty tricks that can be used in such a referendum campaign, they were all used last time by the Florentine François Mitterand, to get the Maastricht Treaty through. So we shall be campaigning in Guadeloupe, and Martinique, and the Isle de la Réunion, and French Polynesia, St Pierre et Miquelon and New Caledonia, and Wallis et Futuna if necessary to avoid losing by 40,000 votes. Get the Atlas out!
I am starting a voter registration guide among the French refugees living in London. I am also checking whether foreign EU citizens living in France can vote and how to arrange this. My new blog Combat (named after the WWII Resistance magazine against the Nazi occupation) launched today will be tracking the campaign in French.
Instead of the national anthem’s “aux armes citoyens!”, let us “aux urnes citoyens!”
*”To the ballot boxes citizens!”
You may remember this sad incident in the opening days of the Iraq Campaign: a US Patriot battery engaged and shot down a returning British Tornado. The official report on the incident is finally out:
IFF failure led to destruction of RAF Tornado
A Royal Air Force (RAF) Board of Inquiry investigating the destruction of an RAF Tornado GR.4A by a US Army Patriot missile during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq has concluded that the aircraft’s identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system had failed. However, it also criticised the missile-classification criteria used by the Patriot system, and the US Army’s Patriot rules of engagement, firing doctrine and crew training.
[Jane’s Missiles and Rockets – 28 June 2004]
If any of our readers has a link to a pdf of the original report – if such exists – I would be happy to include it here.
Editor: Kudos to Julian Taylor for the link to the MoD pdf file.
It is always refreshing to read an article trashing state intervention only to read in the by-line at the end that the author is a candidate for the State of Massachusetts’ Senate.
Going back to look up James D. Miller’s bio details, I see that he is ‘Assistant Professor of Economics, Smith College’. My ignorance of the American education system is profound. Yet it seems to me that this is not the profile I would expect for a British economics professor. A candidate for political office who publicly calls for less state intervention, and does not even ask for more tax money in education! We used to have one or two or those.
I am especially intrigued by Mr Miller’s references (linking to Thomas Sowell) to the two earthquakes in California and Iran during 2003. The reason fewer than 10 people were killed in a Californian earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, whereas 28,000 were killed by a 6.6 Richter earthquake in Iran? One word: wealth.
I really must read more Sowell. And thank you James D. Miller for an educational article.
My friend Robert J Avrech, the Hollywood screenwriter behind such productions as Body Double and The Devil’s Arithmetic, lost his 22-year-old son Ariel to pulmonary fibrosis last July. Ariel, like the rest of his family, was a devout Orthodox Jew, and was also a rabbinical candidate and an incredibly learned Talmudic scholar.
Ariel was just a kid when his family found themselves trapped in a cinema besieged by thugs during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and as he grew older and studied the Torah more closely, he turned his attention to the case made in Jewish texts for the right to private ownership of guns. He eventually grew too weak and ill to put the case down on paper, just as he never did have the chance to go to the shooting range with his father as he dreamed of doing. But Robert has written about the matter himself, and it makes for compelling reading whether you are Jewish or not. I reproduce his essay, in its entirety, with Robert’s kind permission. → Continue reading: Jews and guns
Some time ago President Bush offered 15 billion dollars of American taxpayers money for ‘the fight against AIDS’ in various nations.
Yesterday the Secretary General of the UN denounced the United States for not spending enough money. Now this anger could be dismissed as the Secretary General being upset that so much of the money was going to be spent ‘direct’ in the nations concerned rather than put through the UN (where the Secretary General’s son and his friends could steal some of the money), however this does not explain all the anger directed against the United States at the AIDS conference in Bangkok.
I think the explanation for the anger is very simple – people are never grateful for loot.
Everyone knows that President Bush is not giving his own money when he hands out the 15 billion dollars (assuming that Congress goes along with this idea), he is just taking (by the threat of violence) money from the taxpayers and dishing it out.
Why should anyone be grateful to him? He is not making a sacrifice; he is just handing out the money of the taxpayers. Why should he give 15 billion dollars to the third world, why not 50 billion or 500 hundred billion? It is not costing him anything.
So the various political activists feel no reason to thank President Bush.
It is the old story of ‘conservatives’ and government spending. No matter how much they spend the activists will always think they can get more money from the ‘progressive’ politicians and so will shout and scream and stamp their feet.
Joseph Brennan, one of my regularly occasional Brian’s Friday’s attenders, has taken to emailing me with useful links to things that he thinks might be bloggable. It was he who told me about these great photographs, so that I could tell you. Well, now Joe Brennan he has sent me a link to a piece by Chris Bennett, about the possibility that the world’s oil reserves may not be going to run out any time soon after all.
Personally, on the basis of zero scientific knowledge, I have never been very convinced by the idea that oil has its origins in living organisms. There just seems to be too damn much of it for that. Why has this particular life relic hung around when so much else has just vanished? And why is it all so yuckily similar looking? Life is not like that, even when it is dead. Why could oil have not bubbled up from below, on the same basis that lava does? Such were my ignorant suspicions.
Chris Bennett supplies a more scientifically educated speculation to this same effect. Oil, it is apparently now being thought, may indeed have seeped up and be seeping up still, from the depths of the earth. The organic look that it acquires is because bugs merely like to swim in it, rather than because bugs (or any other living thing) actually perished to create the stuff. From time to time, for example, oil bursts upwards into the caverns otherwise known as the regular oil fields where humans have characteristically tended to find oil before, which results in certain ever dwindling reserves mysteriously refusing to dwindle as much as they should. And so on.
If this theory comes to be accepted, this does not necessarily mean that oil companies will immediately be drilling in new ways and in new places, to new depths. It may merely, to start with, result in a general willingness to commit to continuing oil exploration and to oil-based industry, more than would otherwise have happened. It may be many decades before anyone actually gets a direct tube installed to these vast – and no doubt vastly deep and inaccessible – new oil reserves. For the time being, the oil companies may merely rely on Mother Earth having an occasional attack of the squirts into her underwear, so to speak. And on her farting too, if I understand the theory correctly. Gas is also involved in all this.
I, of course, want to believe that this is all true, if only to see the look on the faces of the environmentalists when they are eventually persuaded that the internal combustion engine is here for ever. And there is now also the fact that I have here tipped this idea as a cheap intellectual share bet, so to speak. So I am sceptical also of my scepticism about the oil-is-dead-bugs theory – or whatever is the official theory now. But this is certainly a fun fence to be sitting on.
Chris Bennett’s article was published as long ago as May 25 of this year. Has there been much discussion sparked by it? What did anyone think? Is there any truth to this notion that oil is of an entirely different origin to the one now generally accepted, and consequently that it is massively more abundant than previously assumed?
Last post for awhile on US Presidential politics. I promise. Having set the table on the domestic side below, a post came along from Mr. Bevan at Real Clear Politics (an invaluable site for US political junkies, by the way) which does a nice job of framing the choice facing American voters this fall on the foreign policy side:
[N]o Democrat, with only one or two exceptions in the entire elected party, would have looked at the exact same intelligence Bush looked at with respect to Iraq after 9/11 and done much of anything – even though they agreed with Bush at the time that Hussein was a serious threat.
And:
Indeed, far more damning than Bush acting on evidence almost everyone in the world believed to be true is to look at a hypothetical in reverse: What if all of the WMD intelligence on Iraq had been spot on and John Kerry were President at the time and chose not to act because of pressure from his party or the objections of allies? I think most Americans would find that prospect deeply disturbing.
Kerry and his fellow Democrats are, for the most part, transnational progressivists committed to having international institutions to deal with bad actors like Saddam. Mr. Bevan provides a useful reminder of how such institutions actually fared, in the real world:
Saddam played cat-and-mouse with the U.S. and the U.N. for nearly a year before finally booting UNSCOM out of Iraq altogether in August 1998.
The response? On September 9, 1998 the UN Security Council passed yet another resolutioncondemning Iraq’s lack of cooperation with inspectors.
On December 16, 1998 the U.S. launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day [ineffectual] bombing campaign against military targets in Iraq.
[On December 21, 1998, the NYT reported that:] Sunday in Paris, President Jacques Chirac of France called for a prompt lifting of the oil embargo. His country’s major oil companies have for years been eager to return to work in Iraq, although record low oil prices make this less attractive now.
In fact, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (France, Russia, & China) responded to the limited use of military force against Saddam for his continued violation of UNSC resolutions by calling to lift the economic sanctions against Iraq and disband UNSCOM completely. And that was basically the end of the whole affair.
Americans tend to prefer leaders who take decisive and effective action against known threats. The media, of course, favors Kerry, and is trying to obscure Kerry’s catastrophic weakness as a leader with the side issue of whether the universally accepted intelligence on Iraq from several years ago was any good.
No leader can afford to wait for perfect information before acting – in the real world, where inaction has consequences, you have to do the best you can with what you have. It is pretty clear that the best Kerry can do, even with the kind of international consensus that existed on Saddam Hussein two years ago, is look around for someone else to take charge.
News of large scale arrests of criminals in Baghdad carried out by Iraqi police are welcome, provided there is due process and it is not simply a trawling operation. It does however demonstrate the differing priorities of an army of occupation versus a police force.
The International Herald Tribune article taken from the New York Times also mentions a drop in ‘spectacular’ terrorist attacks over the past three weeks. Those of us who consider that terrorist groups usually prosper in a climate of lawlessness will ponder the Iraqi situation and reflect on Northern Ireland.
There is little doubt that massive police activity will uncover some terrorist networks and disrupt potential attacks: for example raiding the home of a criminal can turn up equipment intended for terrorist actions.
In Northern Ireland all sorts of crimes, from welfare benefit fraud, fraudulent elections, fire insurance scams, drug dealing, protection rackets, unlicensed gambling and alcohol premises, contract killings and woundings, are tolerated on the grounds that the ‘peace process’ must be kept going.
For the first time in months, I get the sense that Iraq may be going in the right direction. I wish this were the case of Londonderry and Belfast. I have felt for a long time that the violence in Northern Ireland should be considered a law-enforcement problem, separate from politics.
The nuances of Japan’s langauge can be found even in the title of this book, as Hagakure can be rendered as ‘hidden leaves’ or ‘hidden by the leaves’. But this collection of 300 musings and anecdotes, of the 1,300 taken down from the retired samurai retainer Yamamoto Tsuenetono (1659-1719) are close enough to give the Western reader a taste of the ethical ideas, philosophy and moral ideas of the Japanese samurai class.
In 1660 the Shogun prohibited the practice of tsuifuku where a retainer committed suicide at the death of his master. So when Yamamoto’s Master died, he retired to a Buddist monastary, and younger samurai gathered to hear his views. They were transcribed, and these were collected as a book, some excerpts of which can be read here.
They are, to say the least, radically different to anything in the Western moral tradition. This is not a book of essays, many of the precepts are but a paragraph in length, and deal with the ways of the samurai. What preoccupied them was war and death, and the correct way to inflict and recieve them. It is, to our eyes, a gruesome code.
The samurai were the warriors who served their Lords, the daimyo, who were the real rulers of Japan, under the Shoguns and Emperors. Yamamoto Tsuentono devotes much of his work to the conduct and behavior of the samurai retainers. He extolls an ideal of absolute unquestioning obedience; to me it seems like voluntary slavery. And death, of course, is the ideal. The retainer should consider himself as a dead man walking, and should also be ready to die even at his own hand, should his Master require it of him.
Nakano Jin’emon constantly said, “A person who serves when treated kindly by the master is not a retainer. But a person who serves when the master is being heartless and unreasonable is a retainer. You should understand this principal well.”
But of course, the main business of the samurai was to inflict death, and this they did on a constant basis. The ‘Way of the Samurai’ is a military code, designed to discipline men into serving as soliders in a hostile, pre-technological environment. Notions of class and honour evolved into concepts which overpowered other sentiments. Yamamoto scorns women and the ‘lower classes’ when he thinks of them at all. For him, life is death, service is freedom, and killing is love.
This is an important document for the historian who turns to look at Japan. This moral code enabled the conquest of Japan and the destruction of its original inhabitants, over 2,000 years ago, and seems to have evolved until the end of the pre-technological age. As new precepts and ideas emerged in this culture, they survived by winning victory, or were killed in battle, so a form of social Darwinism dominated. For the Japanese were constantly fighting each other.
One meme that did survive was the need to be adaptable to new military ideas. So when the West impinged on the Japanese culture with a decisive technological edge in the 1850’s, the Japanese ruling class embraced the new concepts quite quickly, and within 50 years had totally discarded their old techniques for new. However, they had not changed their ideas on how wars should be fought- they felt that the old ethical considerations and ideas of valour
and honour were quite adequate for the new age.
This is why the brutal ideas of the Hagakure survived into the 20th century. In reading this book, one can see the ideas of the old samurai in full view against the might of Western industrial power. But it was decisively defeated by the US with their own ethical code, and since then, the Japanese have eschewed war for other pursuits. A reading of the Hagakure is enough to remind any reader that this is something we should all be thankful for.
Concerning martial valour, merit lies more in dying for one’s master then in striking down the enemy.
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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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