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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Back in March of this year I did a posting here saying that Japan will be back, and ever since then I have been keeping a particular eye out for Japan news in whatever media stuff came my way. The most startling thing I has spotted so far was an article in the November issue of Prospect, by Eamonn Fingleton, called “Japan’s fake funk”, which says that Japan never went away, and the only surprise will be when the West realises it. This article was subsequently made available here at Financial Review. (My thanks to John Ray for supplying the link to this.) Whatever you think of this piece, it certainly makes fascinating reading. Here’s how it starts:
FOR A DECADE now, the western consensus has been that Japan is an economic basket case. But this is a dramatic misreading of a perennially secretive society. Indeed, it may come to be seen as one of the most significant misreadings in economic history.
Fingleton goes on to argue that Japan’s alleged economic woes are just that – alleged – and that actually Japan is doing very well thank you. It is racing ahead in numerous vital technologies, its standard of living is not at all in decline, and its financial woes are greatly exaggerated. Economically, says Fingleton, Japan has now overtaken the USA.
Why then do the Japanese still send out SOS messages? Because, says Fingleton, it suits them to. Being regarded as a basket case means that they get an easy ride diplomatically from the USA, while they cosy up to the Chinese, who are in Fingleton’s opinion about to emerge any decade now as the world’s dominant economy.
Fingleton is the author of In Praise of Hard Industries, published in 1999, which denounced the internet stock fad for being a fad, so he has something of a pedigree. But is he right?
Or is he just the latest in a long line of dirigiste-inclined self-deluders who regard only certain parts of the economy (in his case big and complicated machines) as being “real” (as opposed to “information” which he reckons is not so real), in the same way that people used to say that only agriculture was real and that manufacturing, and then “finance”, was economic frippery by comparison.
This emailer to Brunton et al. (“Trader”) dismisses Fingleton’s piece as “nonsense”, for all the usual financial reasons that we’ve become familiar with. Fingleton regards people like “Trader” as self-deluders.
Other commentators have made much of Japan’s alleged demographic woes, in the form of a rapidly aging population.
Well, who is right?
If the technological facts assembled by Fingleton are right – Japan racing ahead in “key technologies”, like supercomputers, machine tools, and so forth – then if Japan is in decline, it is in a very odd sort of decline, caused, it would seem, by them financing high technology for the rest of us at a loss, and thus becoming the world’s best informed paupers. Sort of technological monks, you might say.
I don’t know what the truth is about all this, but I would like to very much. Comments?
Brotherhood, solidarity, unity, love: they all mean these but not those, you but not them.
– Michael Frayn, Constructions, 1974
I detect something of a ‘first principles’ air hanging over this blog at the moment. An impatient urge to push rudely past the tennis-match formality of polite debate and embrace the raw, beating heart of the matter.
This atmosphere may not last and, truth be told, I hope it doesn’t, lest it descends into an arid aesthetism that tends to mitigate heavily against the kind of rumbustious fun we prefer to trade in. That said, I wish to strike while the iron is hot and use this window of opportunity to get something off my chest (where it has been squatting like a toad).
Over at ‘The Edge of England’s Sword’ the otherwise reliably insightful Iain Murray has been conducting his own personal War on Drugs. Iain has referred to a report indicating the cannabis is not a ‘gateway’ drug (i.e. people who use cannabis will not necessarily gravitate towards using ‘harder’ drugs such as cocaine, heroin etc). Iain takes the view that the report is misleading for reasons that, I daresay, he could explain with his customary precision. I think it is fair to say that Iain, along with many others, opposes drug legalisation.
I take objection to Iain’s position and not because I have any persuasive evidence as to whether cannabis is or is not a ‘gateway’ drug. It is because I simply do not care.
→ Continue reading: First, they came for the opium…
Here’s another “wonder of capitalism story. Yes folks, Internet connections on passenger airplanes. As Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog, who piloted me to the story, puts it:
Look, no Ministers of Transport, no Euro-directives, no dirigisme. Isn’t greed good.
I suppose, what with Samizdata being in the gloomy mood it’s in just now, various among us will find ways to be depressed even about this. Either (a) it will offer terrorists new ways to hijack airplanes, blow them up or even fly them into famous landmarks, without even being on them. Or else (b) it will be annoying to have to sit next to a surfer or emailer, especially if he has a sound card. Like portable phones on trains all over again, in other words.
But I’m impressed. Patrick has now bestowed upon me automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, for when he isn’t in the mood. So maybe one day I’ll do a celebratory posting to TB from an airplane:
“Patrick and transportsmen everywhere, how are you my old mates? How’s things? Trains all late as usual, are they? Cars and buses and lorries all jammed up? Good, good. I’m now two and half minutes away from landing at Stanstead. I estimate I’m somewhere north of Watford. I’ve been delayed by strong cross winds but I’ll be at arrivals in thirty three minutes and expect to be back at base in one hour and forty seven and a quarter minutes, approximately, can’t be sure exactly. You may have to delay the meeting by three and a bit minutes, maybe four. Or so. I’m doing my final approach now. The flaps are coming out into flap mode. The wheels are now down. No, I tell a lie. Yes, here they come. Oops. Rather bumpy, my son, rather bumpy. But mustn’t grumble, know what I mean? Have to unplug now. See you at head office in one hour, forty two and eleven sixteenths minutes. Give or take. Gotta rush.”
Maybe not. Seriously, when I’m actually on that airplane I’ll have something better than that to say, and it will be good to keep up with the blogs. I think this is very good news.
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is, in some sense, more than merely the aggregate of all individuals, their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that, in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded, it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind.
– F. A. Hayek
A British court today has ruled that Darren Taylor, a burglar who was stabbed to death with his own knife by homeowner John Lambert, was lawfully killed.
Taylor and his accomplice, Ian Reed, both high on drugs and drink, burst into the Lambert’s home and held a knife to the throat of Mrs Lambert, demanding £5,000 from the couple. In the ensuing melee, John Lambert managed to kill Taylor and drive off Reed.
When the police finally arrived, they arrested Mr Lambert for murder, although all charges were later dropped against him whilst the surviving criminal, Ian Reed, was sentenced to eight years in prison for robbery.
It would be nice if there was a presumption of innocence when the cops show up and see situations such as these. After all, when the cops shoot a man dead for no good reason at all, it is just taken as a given that it was lawfully done. In John Lambert’s case, his rights were ultimately upheld but it is hard to escape the feeling that there is one rule for agents of the state and another for its subjects.
Alas, the ‘British Disease’ appears to have spread to Australia:
“Australia is set to ban more than 500 types of handguns and will give people six months to hand in their arms or risk going to prison.”
Is there still time for free Australians to fight back? If so, then I urge them not to make the same mistake that gun-owners in the UK made by trying to defend gun-ownership as necessary to the continued participation in shooting sports. Minority sports are casually expendable. Not so, the right to self-defence. It is the latter that you must fight for. It also has the benefit of being the truth.
Make sure every Australian knows that. Shout it from the top of Ayers Rock.
Samizdata Illuminatus occasionally has a turn of phrase that I can only envy:
“This bespeaks a political elite on the Continent of Europe that is increasingly aloof and out of touch with ordinary citizens. On one level, this is encouraging, because such arrogance usually comes before a fall from grace. However, it also suggests that if the situation is not tackled soon, the anger boiling up in Germany and elsewhere could turn ugly.”
I don’t know about Germany but I can report that to some extent the problem of an out of touch elite may be addressed in France. Unlike anywhere else in Western Europe the French presidential election in France this year produced a second round run-off between one right-wing sleazeball and a beyond the pale authoritarian populist. The Socialist Party candidate got less than one in five votes on such a low turnout that the abstention rate alone spoke of “a crisis for democracy”.
In Britain we’ve become so accustomed to hearing hyped up scaremongering every time a racialist candidate gets more than 500 votes in Blackburn, that we don’t realise that the scared commentators in France were, well… really scared.
Unlike Britain, most of Europe contains large numbers of people who actually know what it’s like to have soldiers kick down the door of their home, or a neighbour’s. → Continue reading: “Oui, premier ministre!”
Richard Miniter, who gave a speech at the Libertarian Alliance conference described by David Carr, enthusiastically recommends this essay by David Warren, entitled “Wrestling with Islam”, which I missed when it came out during last month.
Choosing paragraphs to excerpt is difficult, because, as Miniter says, it is all so good. Try this:
Elsewhere, we encounter the old elites, but find them like beached whales, still nominally presiding over the societies which they have helped destroy, economically, socially, religiously, and in every other practical way, so that there was nothing left for them but to find a new excuse for holding on to power, and someone else to blame for what happened.
In Pakistan, for instance, the elites are certainly still there, only beginning to be diluted by the arrivistes from the Islamist madrasas. From the other side, they are bled by emigration, for the engineers and the technocrats, and the other functionaries of the New Class, are leaving as fast as they can to the West. It is an economic imperative, there are diminishing opportunities at home; for where there is no oil to pump and refine, there tends to be precious little else in the way of an economy. They wash their hands of all those five-year plans, and get quite peacefully on planes for Europe and America, where they can hope at least to stay solvent. And all they are really leaving behind is the poor of their societies, to fend for themselves.
The New Class that remains, which by now is becoming rather an old class, finds itself enmired in a more and more urgent search for some new silver bullet, some fine new theoretical scheme to replace the tried-and-failed socialism, if for no other reason than to justify their own purchase on elitehood. The alternative is to slide down from eminence, into those mushrooming brick, stick, tin & mud suburbs that they must fear in a way that we, who have not seen them up so close, can never fully understand or empathize with. It is no small thing to lose your place in the social order; and especially in an order with such deep shafts.
→ Continue reading: David Warren wrestles with Islam
Germany’s hapless Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has dished out insults at the musician who penned a chart-topping song that Adriana wrote about last week, taking a crack at Germany’s onerous taxes.
Well, tough luck, Gerhard. It seems the Chancellor doesn’t like the fact that the crippling confiscation of German citizen’s money is provoking satire as well as anger. When a politician starts bashing the comics and music makers, it is a clear sign he or she is in trouble – big trouble.
This bespeaks a political elite on the Continent of Europe that is increasingly aloof and out of touch with ordinary citizens. On one level, this is encouraging, because such arrogance usually comes before a fall from grace. However, it also suggests that if the situation is not tackled soon, the anger boiling up in Germany and elsewhere could turn ugly.
Sure, Gerhard. As logical as
assaulting someone’s fist with your face
The man who prefers his country before any other duty duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.
– Lord John Acton
Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something – anything – just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday’s Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:
Poland and the EU
From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson
Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.
Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.
Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.
Yours etc,
RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.
December 3.
It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.
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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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