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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‘Let’s be clear, we don’t have blasphemy laws in the UK.’ So said Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary and premier solicitor impersonator, to the BBC earlier this week. Reynolds was pushing back against US vice-president JD Vance, who gave European leaders a very public dressing down at the Munich Security Conference last week for censoring their voters, and Britain for criminalising its Christians. Of course, Reynolds’s denial was about as trustworthy as his CV.
You needn’t alight, as Vance did, on the vexed issue of ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, which have led to Christians being arrested for staging silent protests / prayers, to see that blasphemy laws have made a horrifying comeback in Britain. Easily a more vivid example is that, a day before Vance addressed the global great and good in Munich, a man was arrested for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in central London. Another man, who slashed at the Koran-burner with a knife, was also arrested. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where we ‘don’t have blasphemy laws’ but you can be arrested – and stabbed – for desecrating a holy book. Maybe Reynolds could finally put that legal training to good use and explain the difference to us.
– Tom Slater
From the Daily Telegraph (£) today:
A quarter of 13 to 17-year-olds recently admitted to the Pew Research Centre that they use ChatGPT to write their homework, double the proportion found a year earlier. Last year, the Higher Education Policy Institute found that one in eight undergraduates – 13 per cent – were using AI to write assessments, and 3 per cent were handing in the chatbot’s output without checking it.
Oh dear. As the article says, there are AI programmes now that screen writing to see if a generative form of AI has written it. So we have a sort of arms race, as it were, between those using these systems to write essays or whatever, and those using it to spot the cheats.
Using AI is not quite the same, necessarily, as using a search engine to check up on sources, or a calculator to do sums rather than by hand. I do think that something is lost if a person has no idea of how to go about how to find things out: what references to check, how to validate such references and how to understand sources, levels of credibility and corroboration, etc. Being able to think through a topic, to structure an essay, marshal facts and figures, and come to a convincing conclusion, is a skill. It is also an important way that we hone our reasoning. And I don’t think there is anything specifically “Luddite” in pointing out that using AI to “write” your homework assignment will lead cause atrophy of our mental faculties. And in this age of social media, “coddling” of kids and all the problems associated with a “fragile generation” , it is easy to see this trend as being malign.
I am definitely not saying the government ought to step into this. I think that schools and places of higher learning ought, as part of the conditions of entry and admission (preferably with the consent of parents/students) to restrict AI’s use to avoid people not developing their own mental muscle and developing ability to truly grasp a subject, rather than simply “phone it in”. If a place of learning has a mission statement, it surely ought to want to develop the learning ability and skills of its students. If AI detracts from it, then it is out of bounds.
It is best, I think, to leave this up to individual schools. This is also another reason why I am a fanatic about school choice, and fear the dangers of state central control of schools.
Technology has its place, in my view. In my childhood, pocket calculators started to be used, but we were not allowed to use them in class until we’d already mastered maths the old-fashioned way. (I used them in doing my physics O-level, for example, so long as I clearly could show my workings if asked.)
Here is an associated article by Gizmondo. On a more optimistic point, venture capital mover and shaker Marc Andreessen has thoughts on the overall positives from AI.
I also have a more financial concern. If students, such as undergraduates, are using AI to write essays, even whole dissertations, etc, then it makes it even more scandalous that they rack up tens of thousands of dollars, euros or whatever in debt to pay for this. Because if they get a degree thanks to ChatGPT (that rhymes!), then what exactly have they got for their money?
“Earlier this week, the BBC admitted it had broadcast an hour of primetime television narrated by the son of a Hamas terrorist leader. This connection to terrorism was not initially disclosed to audiences.”
– Danny Cohen, Daily Telegraph (£) Here’s a non-paywalled story about this.
“Violent offenders face ban on owning knives” reports the Telegraph.
Violent offenders face being banned from owning knives under plans to be considered by the Home Secretary.
Something tells me that the violent offenders will face this prospect with the equanimity that comes from already having faced a ban on being violent criminals.
Offenders with a propensity for knife possession or violence would be designated a “prohibited” person under the proposed crackdown drawn up by police.
They would be banned by law from buying certain types of knives or applying to be a registered knife seller.
Chris Rose has been inspired to do his bit to help the Home Secretary fight crime:
Hi
@YvetteCooperMP
I’ve just opened my kitchen drawer and sternly warned the knives not to wonder off and stab people whilst I’m away otherwise you’ll ban them.
Later today, I’ll also be talking to my car to not drive into any crowds.
I will forever remember that it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that made me realise the political right is as retarded as the political left.
– Tim Newman
We can no longer afford luxury beliefs. It’s not sustainable to have investment funds which shun arms companies on ESG grounds. It’s no good saying you want to save the planet if you can’t stop China and Russia controlling more and more of it. It’s self-harming to apply DEI policies to the military. The services are there to intimidate and, if that fails, kill our enemies, not impress them with how kind we are to people struggling with their gender identity. Laws policed by foreign courts which prevent our security and intelligence services doing what is necessary to keep us safe are weapons we have fashioned to arm the terrorists who wish to harm us. If our agents can’t do their job because of the ECHR, it must be changed until they can. Or junked.
– Michael Gove (£), who for once is kind of making sense
However sympathetic you are to the populist cause, however “realist” on Ukraine, it is impossible to defend the head of the world’s most powerful nation putting out reckless semi-literate screeds like this.
– Freddie Sayers
The prosecution of speech crimes will erode public trust in the police and is taking us to anarcho-tyranny: the police will come after easy targets, and leave persistent criminals to run rampant. There is no British equivalent to the “thin blue line” movement in the United States, a segment of the population which will support the police come what may, and they may find themselves without a dependable public support base. While it is for politicians to repeal the laws which have killed free speech in Britain, the police must do their part too to revive Robert Peel’s founding principles and protect the safety, order and indeed liberties of the British people, instead of enforcing the political creed of multiculturalism over freedom, as many do today.
– Fred de Fossard
Preston Byrne makes the comparison in a speech at the Free Speech Union.
Competition has utterly transformed telecommunications after the state Post Office monopoly was ended. The same happened with deliveries when Amazon came along with an innovative service. Uber and Airbnb have each transformed their markets.
That is how competition works. It is Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Like evolution, it works by a selective death rate. It is not who owns the production, it is how easy it is for potential competitors to gain access to the market. Growth, productivity and innovation are driven by competition. Producers vie to satisfy the consumers, and those who do so survive, for a time, over those who do not.
One thing that competition ensures is change. It leads to a dynamic economy, just as its absence leads to a static one.
– Madsen Pirie
In all the calls I come across from the Left, it is not often to find examples of how rich people are attacked because if they are allowed to keep more of their wealth (even if is legitimately acquired and without coercion), the money disappears. Forever, kid. It’s lost.
Yes, you read that right. The money vanishes into a black hole. An argument against “trickle-down” economics (which is a term no serious free marketer I have heard of actually uses) is that nothing “trickles” anywhere. Apparently, there is this place, someone on Earth, where money is just sitting around, gathering dust, all on its unproductive exile, just waiting to be rescued by a benevolent State so it can be put back into work. It sounds like a first draft of the plot from the Count of Monte Cristo and the bit about the secret treasure that Edmond Dantes discovered and used to persecute his foes.
Why do I mention this bizarre idea? Because I read it defended and set out in a book, The Future Of Finance: The Rising Tide of Fintech Lending and the Platform Economy, by Francesco Filia and Daniele Guernini, (Whitefox Publishing, 2024). The book is a mostly informative account of how modern digital technology is changing finance. It talks about the role of blockchain; decentralised finance (DEFI) and other developments. It has lots to commend it if you want to understand these ideas, and the use cases in finance for technologies such as AI. But…some of the economic contentions in the book are bonkers.
For example, the authors claim that “we know” that wage growth and equality drive economic growth. (No clear evidicence is given for this contention.) They argue that wage growth continued for about 100 years until 1970, when it apparently stopped.
However, that begs the question of whether there was a lot of equality in that period. Was there a lot of equality, in relative, equality-of-outcome terms, during the “Gilded Age” of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and the rest? (There was not, but the rising tide of wealth nevertheless was considerable.) Was there much of that during the 1920s? I suspect that equality, brought about by steeply progressive tax rates (and they caused issues) did not really manifest itself greatly until after WW2, and even then, given exemptions and other forces, American society in some ways was less egalitarian than in Western Europe.
The authors argue that a labour shortage drove this wealth growth, but surely, absent the restrictive and destructive impact of labour union restrictive practices, it was superior capital investment, and hence superior productivity, that meant tight labour markets coexisted with rising real wages in certain countries. (West Germany rapidly overtook the UK, and it was a country where income tax rates kicked in at higher levels, unions were less obstructive, and there were fewer price controls under the Adenauer administrations than, say, the UK.) The authors make no reference whatsover in this part of the book to investment in capital. But it is total factor productivity (physical capital, human capital, etc) that makes the difference over time to income growth. The US labour market was, relatively, less unionised in the post-war period than the UK one, for example, but the standard of living in the US rose relatively faster, as Milton Friedman pointed out in his book, Free to Choose.
The idea that real incomes have somehow stagnated because wages have stopped rising ignores what might have caused that stagnation. I argue that they get causation back to front. If it is a shortage of labour that causes wages to rise, then surely, absent state intervention, capital will flow into machinery and the like to make up the shortfall, and such a country will also attract immigration (hopefully, of the sort that adds value via skills). In the US, as recounted by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge in their masterful account of American capitalism, that’s exactly what happened. During the 19th century, even before the US Civil War, the US saw tremendous growth of labour-saving devices to handle this labour shortage issue. For instance, the McCormick reaper-binder, Singer sewing machine, and more. Light bulbs, early air conditioning…you name it, have also increased returns on human labour because light bulbs allow 24-hour shift work; AC enables places that are otherwise stinking hot to be more economically viable, and so on. And this capital equipment made US workers more productive and increased their real income, other things being equal.
But it is on page 64 that Filia and Guernini ramp up their error wholesale and put forward what I call the “consumption theory of wealth”, which puts spending, rather than investment, innovation and creativity, as the cause of why we are better off: I am going to quote a passage in full:
“When employees and ordinary people (as opposed to odd people, ed?) have more money in their pocket, they spend it. The go out and spend money in restaurants and bars or entertainment venues, they buy new cars or modernise their homes. As a result, that money goes into the real economy to create demand for goods and services and helps businesses prosper and the economy to grow. But when already wealthy people and business owners keep more money via tax cuts, that money is squirrelled away. It’s dumped in offshore trust funds to minimise tax till further or it’s used in stock buybacks. It never reaches the real economy. All it does is to create even greater inequality.” (My emphasis in bold.)
So, if a person saves any money or “squirrels it away”, it is potentially gone. The idea that savings are important, and a source of investment, is totally absent in this account As several on this blog such as Paul Marks regularly point out, a problem in many modern economies is that when investment is financed by central banks’ printing of money, and not real savings made possible by foregoing consumption, it bids up the factors of production, and that without injecting yet more funny money to keep the party going, there’s a crash. The importance of savings cannot be overstated in making sustainable growth possible. The authors claim, with no real evidence, that if money is salted away in a low/no-tax jurisdiction such as the Cayman Islands, Mauritius, Jersey or Dubai, that this money disappears. It’s gone. But that’s plainly rubbish: that money is invested. Why else put it offshore? Even if that money is put into government bonds, that is lent to someone to finance something.
It is true those who use such jurisdictions hope to reduce their overall tax, and in many cases, they defer tax burdens rather that remove them. After all, a person may still want to repatriate their wealth eventually, for whatever reason, and they pay tax on it when that happens. They could, I suppose, give it to charity – but then that money will also go into the “real economy”.
But the idea that money that is not taxed goes out of existence is beyond bizarre. I don’t even know if Thomas Piketty, the French academic who called for progressive taxes and assaults on wealth, went so far into arguing that rich people’s money just vanishes from “real economy”.
Anyway, apart from page 63 and 64, it is a decent book.
I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values; we must live them. Within living memory of many in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections—were they the good guys? Certainly not. And thank God they lost. They lost because they neither valued nor respected the extraordinary blessings of liberty: the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.
Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.” Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny on the internet,” a so-called Day of Action.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant (and I’m quoting) “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.”
Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes—not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply that it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
The officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zones” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
– J.D. Vance speaking at the Munich Security Conference 2025
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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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