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 am in the process of moving, from my native Michigan to the western suburbs of Washington DC. When I closed on my current home in April 2000, I financed the loan at 7.75% apr for 30 years. I am currently qualified to borrow at 6.40% for 30 years. The yield on 30-year US treasury bonds has fallen by a similar amount.
Why do I bring this up? Remember, back in 2000, American politicians were talking up the surplus. Today, thanks to recession, a flat stock market and post-911 spending, the US will probably finish with a deficit in fiscal 2002. But according to a novel theory recently introduced by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, federal deficits cause mortgage rates to rise! So see, tax cuts would increase the deficit, which would increase mortgage rates, which would make new home purchases more expensive, which would hurt working families. Well then, if that is true, why is my lending rate so much more favorable now than it was when the US budget was solidly in the black?
The US does not finance much of its debt with 30 year bonds. In fact, the duration of the national debt (a fancy way of saying the average time to maturity) is just under 5 years. The federal treasury does not contribute very much to the demand for long-term funds. So it should not be surprising to learn that there is essentially no historical relationship between federal borrowing and mortgage rates. In fact, the US did not start to aggressively work down the duration of the debt until the Democrats and Treasury Secretary Rubin came into power!
If Daschle wants to pay down the debt, why would he want to do it in a period in which yields on long-term debt were falling? As anyone who stayed awake in finance 101 knows, prices and yields move in opposite directions, so lower yields mean that it would cost more to retire long-term debt from bondholder’ hands. This would amount to little more than a subsidy paid by US taxpayers to bondholders, who increasingly are foreign investors.
Politicians used to be smart enough to know that they aren’t very smart about economics. Senator Daschle evidently does not feel constrained by his ignorance.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about an organisation that calls itself ‘Anti-war’ who operate a website called (not surprisingly) ‘Anti-war.com’ wherein a cabal of eminent writers and thinkers campaign vigourously against the foreign policy of the US government and, currently, its choice to respond militarily to the WTC attacks. Making quite a to-do they are
Chief among the ‘anti-warriors’, and apparently their poster boy, is one Mr. Justin Raimondo who seems to be postively incandescent with rage at the US government for launching a racist war to further the imperialist aims of the Washington elites. Mr.Raimondo claims that his views are informed by his libertarian, non-interventionist, principles based on which, the US should stop its foreign adventures, stop meddling in other countries, stop ‘putting pins in rattlesnakes, stirring up hornets nests etc, etc (By the way, foreigners are all ‘rattlesnakes’ and ‘hornets’? Just how racist is that?)
Nothing reprehensible about that position. Isolationism is not a principle I agree with but, when honestly debated, it is a defensible position. What is reprehensible are insinuations that the US brought this attack on itself and only has itself to blame. Reprehensible because (a) they are factually wrong and (b) brutally insensitive and (c) par for the course with Mr. Raimondo
That’s right. He’s flogged this particular ‘blame the victim’ horse before in an article that I’m quite sure he’d like buried now but, alas, it’s too late (thankyou, Google). The link below will take you something that Mr.Raimondo wrote in 1999 as an expression of his ‘libertarian principles’
Now before you go there, I feel it only fair to issue a product warning: it’s long. It’s long, it’s turgid and it’s full of details about who said what to who at the National People’s Democratic Conference of 1968 (or something). In other words, it reads like a Trotskyite student screed; the kind of thing that is so laboured and coma-inducing that you get the feeling it has been written with a view to bludgeoning you into submission by the sheer weight of it’s paragraphs. Not that I am, for even a moment, suggesting that Justin is a Trotskyite because he clearly isn’t. No, he’s worse than that, he’s a bore
But I always say that the truth is worth suffering for so, take some amphetamines, prepare a pot of strong coffee, tell your family you’re going to be away for a while and click here
You’re back! Well, brace yourself: it is the year 2025. Men have colonised Mars and… Okay, only joking
The article itself though is rather less of a joke and I knew something was iffy right away when I saw this breathtaking assertion:
“…the Chinese media has been relatively open for some time”
Really, Justin??!! Perhaps you could direct us all to the URL for the Chinese Anti-War.com then? Better still, take yourself over to Hong Kong and start ranting at the Beijing government in the same manner as you do Washington. Go on, Justin, I dare you. I double-dare you!!
But that’s the least of it. Justin goes on to assert just how reasonable the Chinese government is and that the Tiananmen Square protestors were nothing more than a contemptible rabble who were complaining about China’s progress towards capitalism and wanted a return to socialist purity and the true principles as espoused by Mao Tse Tung. Now, I am the first to admit that memory does not constitute history, but I clearly recall that the centrepiece of the protest was something called the Goddess of Liberty, a simulacram of the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps Chinese ways are just too inscrutable for this particular British dunderhead, but that would seem a very strange choice of totem for a bunch of Maoist fundamentalists to rally around
But that’s not important. Any public demonstration will invariably attract all manner of folks with all manner of sundry grievances and I wasn’t there so I don’t know. What is important is that they were unarmed civilians and the ‘enlightened’ Chinese government responded by killing them all
Or not, apparently. Because in the Gospel according to Justin:
“… Instead, the President engaged in an hour-long colloquoy with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin on the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, in which a few hundred rioters bent on self-immolation achieved their stated ends”
So there we have it. The protestors were a bunch of suicidal nutbags with stupid ideas who brought it on themselves. They were asking for it. Sound familiar? He even goes as far as to suggest comparison with Jonestown. What were all those tanks doing there then, Justin? Shipping in the laced vodka?
We all know what happened to those protestors because we damn welll saw it happen and what I’d like to know is where is Justin’s incandescence? His outrage? His grief? His condemnation? His concern? Does he even give it a mention? No. Nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Must’ve slipped his mind
I don’t quite understand how someone can live through one of the most savage and brutal episodes of state repression in post-war history (not to mention the persecution of dissidents that goes on to this day) and not only try to pretend that it didn’t happen but actually try to convince us all that the victims commited suicide! Not only that, but ten years after, he goes on to write a fawning apology for that same regime while turning all his indignant guns on Washington. Some people call that historical revision: I call it being on the payroll. If you ask me, this guy is being given an easy time
The fact that he does champion capitalism and free markets, in a way, makes it worse because he clearly has a brain and either he’s delusional or downright mendacious. Either way, if that’s an example of libertarian principles then, damnitall, my application for membership of the Labour Party is in the post
I don’t know Mr.Raimondo and I’ve never met him and I daresay he would rather be hung by the thumbs than to consort with a warblogger like me. So perhaps someone would be obliging enough to pass on this piece of advice next time young Justin starts up on one of his ‘anti-war’ rants:
Mr. Raimondo, you live in a glass house, old chum. Stop throwing stones
Oh and, by the way, be careful what you publish: Google is watching you!
In the side bar it says “lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people”… well tonight it is nothing philosphical or topical or political, it is just a song by the Goo Goo Dolls that we used to listen to.
Comin’ down the world turns over
And angels fall without you there
And I go on as you grow colder
All because I’m…
Comin’ down the years turn over
And angels fall without you there
And I’ll go on to bring you home
All because I’m…
All because I’m…
I’ll become what you became to me
Someone broke my heart tonight.
Whether fried bills raise eyebrows depends on how common they are. I would say the constituency for privacy in everyday monetary transactions is large enough to ensure that at least as high a percentage of fried bills is in circulation at that future date as the percentage of cocaine-positive US $20 bills today.
I’m sure we could come up with bulk fryers. Perhaps some enterprising liberty-conscious individuals of the future will find a way to casually blow the circuits in stacks of moneybags as they pass by the bank…
Brian Linse has responded to my remarks, sort of, about capitalism and the reality of monopoly on AintNoBadDude, though he does not appear to have actually read the article I wrote, or if he did, he obviously did not understand it.
Speaking of Team Sami, Perry has a post on global capitalism or something… Ok, I’ll just admit that I have no idea what the fuck Perry is talking about. I think I may have inadvertantly triggered some primordial proto-libertarian confluence of meta-contextual rhetorical lilliputianisms when I mentioned turn of the century railroad monopolies. Or not. Anyway, just a reminder: E N R O N.
Brian’s obsession with Enron is revealed for what it is: political rather than economic.
My remarks were about the nature of markets and how the effect of regulations is often to cause the very problems they are intended to alleviate, such as monopoly and unsustainable bloated entities like Enron. One does not have to agree with my views but I think they were pretty easy to understand. But clearly Brian is only interested in how Enron’s collapse can be used to hurt the Republicans and thus his eyes glaze over when people like myself, who care nothing for either his precious Democrats nor his detested Republicans, wants to talk about economics.
Fine, no problem Brian. Feel free to continue to opine about Enron without having a clue how real world economics work if that is what excites you, but I think I will decline to get involved in that sort of ‘mass-debate’.
I have had a number of responses and suggestions (most of them polite) on how to deal with smart tagged money. Dale Amon even provided a recipe for dealing with the pesky things. While I’m sure it will work, that’s not the point.
On the money issue, I’m betting that once tagging becomes common place, non-emitting currency will be treated as counterfeit. At best not accepted, at worse generating a call to the authorities. Foil lined bags and wallets will probably be one answer. There will be others. My point was there will be a cost in time, effort and/or finances to achieve the anonymity we now enjoy gratis.
Taking the whole counter-measures idea one step further, I’m sure you will be able to cleanse yourself of smart tags on, in and about your person. When emiting is the norm, however, non-emitters will be regarded with suspicion. It will be seen as attempts to hide your identity. As a modern analogy, you can wear gloves and a full-face ski-mask into a mall, but don’t expect people to treat you normally.
Technology is a very double edged sword, and the ways it is applied are often vastly different from what the inventors intended. Witness Alfred Nobel and dynamite. He was a pacifist who saw the power of dynamite as a way to help cash poor, resource rich countries access the wealth trapped inside the earth. Within a few months of introduction to the world, it was applied to the military and the destructive effects of war increased exponentially. In a similiar vein, how many people involved in the discovery and production of smart tags do you think foresaw the use by the US Army of tags on bees to locate landmines?
The applications of smart tags will be limited only be our imaginations. Literally the stuff of dreams. The tricky part will be ensuring that the dreams in our heads don’t become nightmares in our waking lives.
This morning, January 16th at my home in London, I received a Christmas card from Greensboro, North Carolina. The post mark was dated December 10th 2001.
Now it has often been my observation that the US postal service is not unlike the Bermuda Triangle: a fabled place where the spacetime continuum does not quite work the way it does in the rest of the universe. However what made the letter more interesting, in fact the only thing that made it interesting, was the odd indigo stamp on the envelope:
MISSENT TO
JAKARTA SOEKARNO-HATTA
They sent the letter to Indonesia?
Now I will grant that the address was handwritten rather than printed, but the writing was extraordinarily clear and precise, so I can only speculate that some US postman was just not concentrating, perhaps he was pondering the chore of impending Christmas shopping or contemplating homicide against his colleagues in a shooting spree or some such matter to which US postal workers seem prone, and thus mis-read ‘London SW3, England’ as ‘Jakarta, Indonesia’.
But whoever you are, you little misshapen cog in the vast shuddering machine of the US postal service, I thank you.
One of my absolute pet hates is the ‘Round Robin’ pro forma ‘family up-date’ letter sent by people I met only once many years ago. As they always do, it starts ‘Dear Friends’, followed by an interminable wodge of fascinating details about children I have never met, places I have never visited and have no desire to and strange revelations that
Yes, we have joined the ACC mania for the second year in a row. Surprisingly enough, I can even quote a few stats… that’s scary
Scary? It is bloody terrifying. What the hell is the ACC? And why am I supposed to find that interesting? And why should I care where your children, whom I was only vaguely aware even existed, are going to school? At least I am told Jamie is doing well: good for him…ah, no… later in this interminable missal I discover that Jamie is a she, not a he.
So once again, Mister Distracted Postal Worker, I thank you. There was at least something interesting about this letter… on the envelope.
The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.
– Robert A. Heinlein on censorship
The USA will possibly face the most punitive trade sanctions in the history of the World Trade Organisation if the European Union is granted the right to act on a WTO ruling that US tax breaks for exporters are a violation of global trade rules.
This is entirely a self inflicted wound for the USA. Unlike the vast majority of the rest of the world, the USA claims tax from companies based on their global activities. Quite apart from the fact this is manifestly iniquitous, it is also pretty damn stupid economically. Although EU nations do not attempt to tax globally, the European states tend to subsidise their favoured companies in various ways (which is also stupid from a macro-economic perspective). This in turn has lead the US to deduce for the last 31 years that certain businesses operating in competition with subsidised EU companies should be given tax breaks to help them compete more evenly. There is just one problem with that: making special cases in that manner violates WTO treaty rules.
The solution for the US is of course simplicity itself: just abolish all US taxation at the water’s edge like the rest of the world does… no special cases therefore exist. Result? American businesses overseas flourish without the absurd and wildly expensive accounting gymnastics needed to avoid actually paying very much tax to the American IRS on corporate operations in Mongolia (or wherever).
The fact is, of the medium and small businesses I know of run by Americans overseas, the reality is that they successfully shelter the vast majority of their operations from the US tax man. So why not just recognize that there is no justification for this very hard to enforce ‘taking’ by the IRS… what reasonable pecuniary interest does the US state have on economic activity beyond its shores? Scrap this extraterritorial intrusion and not only is justice served, the WTO problem simply disappears with a loud ‘poof’!
There have been numerous mentions recently of electronically tagging money, the latest of which was by Walter Uhlman below in Sergeant Stinger reporting for duty. But there is no need to worry folks. Follow this simple recipe and your privacy should be restored:
Take 1 wad tagged money.
Mix denominations and national currencies to taste.
Place on Microwave oven tray.
Set microwave to high for 30 seconds.
Enjoy the sparkles of frying microcircuits.
Remove and apply as desired.
No need to bend over and take it. Resistance is not futile. In fact, it’s a lot of fun.
There’s Pork in Their Horoscope, The Guv Replies
Reader Neil Eden contacted the Inspector General’s Office and received the following reply:
After careful review of your complaint, it appears that the appropriate office to contact within the U.S. Department of Education concerning this matter is the Office of Postsecondary Education. You may write to this office at the address listed below:
Accreditation and State Liaison
Office of Postsecondary Education
U.S. Department of Education
K Street, NW, Room 7106
Washington, D.C. 20006
Telephone # (202)219-7011
I trust that this information is helpful to you.
Keep us informed of the responses you get. The fun has only begun.
The U.S. Army is using smart tag-equipped bees to detect landmines, the Financial Times reported recently. Bees have a liking for the explosive TNT. Smart tagged bees, returning to the hive, land on special mats that can detect TNT and identify individual bees. The direction of a bee’s flight and its flight time are used to calculate the approximate position of any landmines. I’m assuming these are surface mount Claymore style mines, not the buried kind. Even so, the application of the technology is astonishing!
Smart tags are radio wave emitters. They come in all shapes of tiny sizes and in a wide variety of frequencies with a range of a few millimeters up to several kilometers. They are similar to the anti-theft tags common in many retail stores, but they have the added ability of also sending data. Smart tags can be built or embedded in anything. With the advent of polymer electronics (plastic microchips), they may one day replace the ubiquitous barcode.
Meanwhile, look for them to turn up in ever-widening circles. Benefits will be as enormous as the potential for abuse. Security and anti-counterfeiting are the two most obvious applications. Governments are especially interested in the movement of money. That metal detector you walk through on your next trip may soon also report just how much cash you’re carrying, right down to the denominations and serial numbers. Got a nest egg squirreled away at home for unforeseen circumstances? With embedded chips, would-be thieves (government sponsored or private entrepreneurs) could drive by outside and use their receiver to count up how much you have and get a good guess about where you’ve hidden it.
Warehousing and inventory is another area to benefit from smart tagging. Parts for everything from toasters to tanks will have embedded chips. After the finished item leaves the factory, the combination of tags will produce a unique radio frequency fingerprint like a remotely accessed serial number.
How about food that tells you when it’s spoiled, makes preparation suggestions, or even programs the microwave? When tagging gets commonplace, we will soon be able to know from afar if that really is a pickle in your pocket.
Personal convenience could also be greatly enhanced. A door could open or your car could start up as you approach. Subway and underground turnstiles could let you pass as long as the card tucked in your wallet is up to date. You can know where your children are at all times. Where they are, whom they are with, what toys they are using, and even what they are eating.
Think about it. The ability to remotely track anything or anyone at anytime and anywhere. A parent’s’ – or secret policeman’s – dream come true.
The widespread use of smart tags will lead to a much more open society. Open in terms of knowing who is going where with what or whom. Personal privacy will become a question of how many counter-measures you can afford, but individuals paying for the privacy will be regarded with suspicion. Intrusive governments and envious neighbors will especially want to know, “What are you trying to hide?”
Hmmm. Come to think of it, it’s not too much different today, is it?
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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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