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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I think it is at least plausible to propose that a vast swathe of bad ideas and damaging policies are borne on the wings not of malevolence or even stupidity, but simply economic illiteracy: a fundamental failure to grasp how money actually works.
If that is the case, then this kind of thing is encouraging:
Personal finance education looks set to become a regular part of school life, following a series of successful pilot schemes across the country.
The charity the Personal Finance Education Group (Pfeg) has been working with teachers to help them provide extra-curricular lessons covering everything from straightforward budgeting to calculating interest and getting a good deal on a mobile phone.
One teacher said: “I think it will broaden their horizons; they will certainly have a better understanding of how to manage money. I think they’ll also have a better understanding of the taxation system and why you pay tax.”
However, enthusiasm should be tempered by the possibility that the subject is not being taught very well or, worse, that the whole thing is the project of ghastly statists who want to use this as a means of driving home pro-tax propaganda to a new generation.
But, those caveats aside, this could be welcome because even if it transpires that this is really all part of a lefty ‘get-them-while-their-young’ programme, the effect might be to start prodding young brain cells in directions that their teachers never intended them to go.
Police are set to get a host of new powers to crack down on anti-social behaviour.
Officers will be able to close down drug dens within 48 hours, and keep them shut for up to six months. For the first time, the Government’s Anti-Social Behaviour Act gives police-style powers to accredited private security guards. Later in the year, security guards and Community Support Officers will get further powers under the same Act.
Also introduced are controversial new police powers to disperse groups of people who have gathered in an area designated an anti-social hotspot by the local council. The host of new powers created by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, were designed to target yobs, nuisance neighbours, vandals and drug dealers who make life a misery for law-abiding residents.
New restrictions on air weapons, raising the age for legal possession from 14 to 17, also come in today. It will also be an arrestable offence to carry air guns in public “without lawful authority or excuse”.
Clearly nothing escapes the hawk-eyed attention of these rapier-witted and attentive public servants:
A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.
The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.
Getting a fiddled expenses claim past them must be a doddle. Let’s all move to Finland!
He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful – and procedures would have to be reviewed.
From now on, mandatory pulse-checks every 24 hours.
From the Guardian, a perfect illustration of the importance of ‘anti-junk-food’ campaigning as the newfound cause du jour of the British left. It is hard to tell which aspect of his own report the author finds more disturbing: capital punishment or the lack of healthy food options for the condemned:
Raymond Rowsey got his deadly dose on January 9, in North Carolina. The sole white among these executed men, Rowsey was convicted for the killing of a convenience store clerk – or perhaps his accomplice half-brother did it, no one seemed quite sure at the trial. Their takings? Two pornographic magazines and $54. Rowsey had a history of horrific childhood abuse. His last meal was pizza, chicken wings, two packets of peanut M&Ms, and a Pepsi.
Junk food and judicial killing. Feel queasy?
But would not the offer of a balanced, healthy last meal be a bit…well, redundant?
It is a seldom-recognised fact that the British are world leaders in the art of grumbling. By a long margin, it is our most popular national pastime. In fact, if grumbling was an Olympic sport (or perhaps synchronised grumbling) then it would be British competitors taking gold, silver and bronze. The other nations do not stand a chance.
And I can find no better example of this kind of world-class, cutting-edge grumbling than this article by Philip Johnston:
Do you ever feel like Howard Beale, the character played by Peter Finch in the film Network? He was a news presenter on American TV who became so frustrated at the refusal of anyone to listen to reason that he invited viewers to open their windows and yell into the streets: “I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.”
Such conspicuous expressions of indignation are more acceptable in America than they are here. When we are as mad as hell, the most forceful manifestation of our emotions tends to be a resigned shrug or a heavy sigh. Understatement is one of our endearing national characteristics; but it also means we can more easily be taken for a ride.
And that is why we lead the world in grumbling. We have the ideal training programme.
Our predisposition to react benignly to developments that would have other people taking to the streets is to be applauded. But this quintessential mildness relies on governments, local councils and others who can interfere in our lives to do so only when it is absolutely necessary, and then in a fair and balanced way. The current Government is no longer able to identify this fulcrum. It brings in legislation because it believes that its very function is to pour forth a cascade of new laws each year, even when there is no demand for them.
Suggest to a minister that he might try to get through the parliamentary session without legislating and he will look at you as if you are crazy. Propose that existing laws should take effect before new ones are introduced and expect a blank stare. After all, what are politicians for if not to bring in laws? “We legislate therefore we are,” should be written on the gates of the Palace of Westminster.
But what else are politicians for? Pray tell, Mr Johnston?
For those fed up with high taxes, street crime, late and dirty trains, inane regulations, the unjustified use of fines and charges, bloody-minded parking restrictions, excessive public sector waste, preposterous European directives, multi-culturalist busybodies, useless and unaccountable council officials and six-hour waits at the local hospital’s A&E centre, a shrug and a sigh are no longer enough.
And so what? What follows from that? If Mr Johnston is proposing that our time-honoured traditions of heavy sighing, eyeball-rolling, muttering and impotent resignation are no longer sufficient grist for the national mill, then so be it, but where do we go from there?
U.S.-based music download business Napster, which is now a paid-for service after its chastening battles in the law courts against the music companies, is extending its services to European customers, according to this report. Well, when it comes to stirring up a hornet’s nest of controversy, few subjects generate more angry buzzes than the case for or against the right to download music on the net, in my experience.
If the record companies ever thought that Napster would vanish without trace, they were deluding themselves. Personally, while I have my questions about the intellectual property right aspects to Napster-style downloading technology, there is no doubt that it has thrown traditional business models into the dustbin. But does it mean the death of music recordings, orchestras, book authors and film-makers? I don’t really think so.
As a related point, there is an interesting article here on the website of science fiction publishing house Jim Baen, making a good point about how downloading can, in the medium to long run, raise rather than cut book sales. I suppose that the argument works for music and possibly films as well.
Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.
French state schools, unlike the British or American varieties, were founded explicitly to oppose clerical power. They are the most visible and enduring bastions of secularism in France. Originally, the prohibition of religious symbols in schools was aimed against Catholics. Many of the supporters of secularism in the 19th century in France were non-conformist or atheist: often Protestant or Jewish. The antisemistism of such groups as Action Française from the 1890s onwards is in turn a reaction against the French radical assault on Catholic society. In the early 20th century a deal was worked out that allowed religious schools to operate alongside the secular system.
The Islamist campaign against secularism is what the headscarf law is about. In some schools, violence has been threatened against girls who refused to wear scarves. Apologists for fundamentalists (ususally socialists hoping to play the race card) condoned the violence and have allowed a climate of terror in French schools.
As a libertarian, I oppose state schools. But also as a libertarian, I also support the prohibition of Islamic fundamentalist intimidation. If Islamic schools really allowed freedom to exit, I could back Moslem campaigns for lifting any restrictions the French government might have against their own schools.
When I visit a mosque, I take off my shoes, I do not interfere with the religious devotions of the worshippers, and I do not demonstrate my own devotions to eating pork and drinking beer. The person who chooses a turban ahead of an education has got “I’m a loser!” stamped all over him. But the people who organise the headscarf campaigns do not want freedom of choice: they want a licence to coerce.
This is not a campaign for religious freedom: Moslems are free to set up their own schools. It is a campaign to separate the public and the private sphere: in the school each pupil’s religious affiliation is a private and not a public matter.
Far be it from me to condone the criminal régime of Chirac. But, this is the same fight as the Turkish Army’s fight to defend a secular state against the fundmentalist tyranny. It is a small corner of the War on Terror, and compared with the some of the antics of the Department of “Homeland Defense” a.k.a. Minipax, one worth fighting.
It is also a campaign against obscurantism. French people often mock those parts of the USA where it is illegal to teach Darwin, or where Creationist theories have to be accorded equal credibilty in the classroom.
The European Commission has released the latest press release on demographic developments in the European Union during 2003. This shows that the long-awaited time when deaths outweigh births and immigration maintains the population of the European Union is beginning to arrive.
The population of 380.8 million increased by 1,276,000 during 2003, of which three-quarters was due to natural migration. However, there are two worrying trends that suggest Europe’s demographic problems can only worsen in the coming years.
Germany, Italy and Greece would all have faced population declines without immigration. More countries will join this select group in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Secondly, half of the accession countries that are scheduled to join the European Union on the 1st May 2004 are already facing the problem of population decline, a problem that will be exacerbated by migration towards Western Europe.
There always has to be a disclaimer using the figures from Eurostat since demographics are one of the most unreliable of all collected statistics. Neverthless, taking this disclaimer into account, the population decline is beginning to take hold at a rapid pace.
It is the accession countries who probably have most to fear. Enlargement can be viewed as a cannibalisation of the labour markets of the accession countries by existing Member States and the newcomers face huge problems of tightening and declining labour markets in the long run. If they join the Eurozone, they will lose the remainder of the economic flexibility needed to combat this problem, since their adoption of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, will lead to far greater regulation from May 1st.
The European solution to the problems that they have created will be further subventions to cushion the blow of joining the European Union and satisfaction at removing a possible ring of economic competitors along their eastern border. Hopefully, Russia and the Ukraine will begin to attract more investment in the next few years and prove too large to swallow.
Instapundit links to this:
The capture by the United States of thousands of centrifuges on board a German-owned vessel, the BBC China, en route to Libya has raised suspicions in Washington and London that Col Gaddafi offered to abandon his weapons programme after threats from America, rather than the lengthy British and American diplomacy vaunted by Tony Blair.
Instapundit is pleased because this report says what he and lots of others have also said, that it was American military muscle and the threat of more of it, not merely polite requests to Col Gadaffi to be nicer from Blair or his fellow Europeans. Quite so. The idea that recent American military activity had nothing to do with Gaddafi’s change of heart is very far fetched.
But what irritates me is that Blair, the Telegraph, Instapundit, the lot of them, are all talking about “threats” and “diplomacy” as if these were two entirely different and opposite things, when in truth threats and diplomacy go hand in hand, and neither can work properly without the other.
Take this particular set of circumstances. How were those American threats communicated, if not through diplomatic channels, and how did Col Gaddafi signal his desire to comply with American wishes if not through that same diplomatic process? And did not the Americans then respond very diplomatically to the Colonel’s climbdown?
As for that non-American diplomacy which is imagined by some to have persuaded Gol Gaddafi to change his ways, well, this report illustrates that this too would have consisted of threats, diplomatically communicated and responded to, in this case the threat of not allowing such things as centrifuges to journey from China to Libya on ships controlled by those doing the threatening. An unwillingness to make any such threats would have rendered European diplomacy toothless, and hence ineffective. And that seems to be what happened.
But that is not my central point. All I here insist on is the true as opposed to sentimental and ignorant meaning of the word “diplomacy”. Diplomacy doesn’t mean being nice only. It also means being nasty, while explaining nicely – or perhaps not so nicely – what you want in exchange for being less nasty.
What does anyone think that diplomats actually say?
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about walking in London, and just before I got to Parliament Square I encountered a demo. It was not raucous or unpleasant. It was nice. It was old people complaining about their council taxes, which obviously I am all in favour of.
Following the example of supreme Samizdatista Perry de Havilland, I now take my DigiCam with me whenever I go a-wandering, so I was able to start snapping. At first it was just nice old people accompanied by nice policemen, with nice buildings in the background, but only very crude signs to say what it was all about. However patience was rewarded, and some of the signs were highly informative.
27.2%. Ouch! Whatever happened to stealth taxes? (Hey hey LBJ, you killed 27.2% more kids today than yesterday, you bad bad person. Not the same ring to it, somehow.)
And this one takes onlookers into the university lecture theatre.
Okay, okay, I’m excited, and I want to know more. How can I follow it up?
Wow, a website. They say, in fact Perry just said it to me in connection with this post, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I reckon best of all is pictures with words embedded in the pictures, explaining everything. Preferably with an internet link.
There is an interesting and deeply depressing article in Time Europe about how EUrope is falling behind the USA in the funding of scientific research. European scientists are flocking the research labs in the USA, where the money and conditions are far better.
The article reveals the usual EUro-procedure whenever catching up with America is the agenda.
Question asked by EUropeans: how much money is America spending? Answer: A lot.
Question not asked by EUropeans: where does all that American money come from in the first place? Answer: by having lots of trade, done by tradesmen.
Question also not asked by EUropeans: who is spending all this American money and how? Answer: American research money is, a lot of it, spent by those same tradesmen, who spend it quite sensibly, in ways that produce innovation and profits.
Next question asked by EUropeans: what is to be done? Answer offered by EUropeans: EUropean governments must spend a lot more on research than they do now. Result: EUrope as a whole has even less money for tradesmen to spend on anything, and research in EUrope becomes even less sensible and even more stupid. Total spending doesn’t grow very fast, which is just as well, because if EUro-governments spent as much as “America” (i.e. the American government and all those American tradesmen, added together) spends on research, that would bankrupt EUrope completely. → Continue reading: The decline of EUro-science
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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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