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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“Viktor Orban ruins his rivals with power grab”, the Times reports.
Under a regime described by critics as the “omnipotence law”, Mr Orban’s government is able to take sweeping measures to tackle the coronavirus epidemic without parliamentary approval.
Within days of the reform it announced that parties, banks, multinational corporations and local councils would be obliged to pay into a £3.3 billion national fund designed to cushion the blow to the Hungarian economy.
Political parties must hand over half of the grants they receive from the state, a total of about £2.8 million, Gergely Gulyas, one of Mr Orban’s closest ministerial allies, said. The measure will apply to all Hungarian parties, including Fidesz, the prime minister’s party, which is backed by businesses that have benefited from public contracts. Some of its struggling rivals, however, are heavily reliant on public funding. Jobbik, the largest opposition party in the National Assembly, is still reeling from a fine of nearly £1 million after auditors found that it had underpaid for billboard advertising.
Emphasis added. From what little I know of Hungarian politics, the Jobbik and Fidesz parties seem to have swapped bodies. I hold no brief for either. But I can sympathise with the plight of anybody – or any body – that suddenly has their financial support kicked away. Unfortunately that is what happens when the state pays your bills: what the state gives, the state can take away. Hence the “self ownership” tag on this post.
As I wrote the above, I remembered having written something very similar before. That post was about the last of the Kalahari Bushmen. The plight of the last opposition parties of Hungary is not quite as desperate as theirs, but give it time.
So few people have any understanding of the importance liquidity plays in markets (which is why ‘speculator’ is a dirty word to the ill-educated twats who don’t grasp the essential role speculators play).
– Perry de Havilland
“But if this really is the moral equivalent of war then history teaches us that wars can be won on the battlefield but lost on the home front, and just as nations have been defeated because they ran out of food or a revolution broke out, so the Government’s strategy could collapse because the millions of civilians stuck indoors lose patience.”
– Tim Stanley
Did you know that Boris doesn’t know who won the battle of Stalingrad? If you did not know this, please continue not to know it, because it is not in fact true. Should you encounter a reader of The Economist, however (one of life’s occasional joys of which I am now deprived by the lockdown), you may be told that Boris’ biography of Sir Winston Churchill reveals this and other remarkable lacunae in our current PM’s historical knowledge – told in a tone of great certainty and with the firmest assurance that any milder speculations you offer (for what Boris might have said to appear to mean such things) are not possible, so established are the facts.
I have never once in my entire life given money to The Economist in exchange for the doubtful privilege of reading it (and see very much less than no reason whatever to begin now), so I encounter copies but rarely in airplane lounges and on other people’s coffee tables. I therefore cannot tell you whether Economist readers believe this because an Economist writer once told them that or implied it, or merely because reading The Economist renders one credulous of such urban legends (insofar as the habit of reading The Economist does not reveal that one already is).
So astonished was I to be assured of this claim (by the undoubtedly educated and well-read) as a matter both unsurprising and beyond all doubt, that I have now once in my entire life given money to Boris (not to some cause he also espouses) in exchange for a copy of his Churchill biography – something I deduce Economist-readers are more loath to do even than I am to buy their rag. It struck me as a more primary source for verification than tracking down whatever years-old copy of The Economist had reviewed it or made a passing reference to it, or tracing the origin of its readers’ urban legends about it.
I was not surprised to learn that Boris knows what the gardener, the hairdresser and even the teenager all know – that Stalingrad did not end well for Adolf. I was not surprised to find I was correct in my pre-purchase guess that some throwaway one-liner about how far Adolf got despite Churchill (to suggest how dangerously further he might have got without Churchill) would be the sole basis for the bizarre claim that Boris didn’t. But after reading right through the book I am very surprised to discover just how vicious and/or deranged a reviewer would have to be to pretend and/or imagine that the text even remotely suggests such a thing (and likewise for the other claims).
That, however, is secondary. In her study of anti-semitism, Hannah Arendt explains that establishing the history of how ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was forged is secondary. The historian’s primary subject is that the forgery is being believed. That someone – maybe originally some writer for The Economist but maybe, for all I know, originally just some reader of it holding forth to other readers in an upscale SW1 pub – claimed that Boris did not know a historical fact so famous that even an update of ‘1066 and all that’ might call it ‘memorable’, is secondary. The greater strangeness is that this claim is being believed – not by Jeremy two-Es Corbyn and his Momentum followers but by at least a few highly educated people who, in the late 1980s, were voting for Thatcher’s and Reagan’s economic policies even as they virtue-signalled disdain for their populism. What goes on in otherwise-intelligent minds to let a person move from that to this? How can their sense of reality be so deficient that they can be told Boris does not even know who won Stalingrad and still hear no alarm bell, no, “Maybe I should just check whether even Boris could really not know even that”?
The Economist was founded in 1843, not so long before Mill explained that democracy works best when:
“the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they have always done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.” (‘On Liberty’, John Stewart Mill, 1859)
By this definition, The Economist has always been just what it claims to be: ultra-liberal. It is said that a senior editor once gave a junior colleague terse advice on how to write his first Economist leader article:
“Pretend you are God.”
The Economist has sometimes changed its mind in fact – it was rather late to abandon its Keynsianism for monetarism in the 1980s but it did. What never changes is the unapologetic arrogant smugness of a pretence that one suspects senior editors do not always recall is pretence. The Economist’s latest editor, a woman named Beddoes, is a Keynsian who thought Obama was wonderful. She belongs irredeemably to those whom Dominic Cummings described as:
always writing about how ‘shocking’ things are to them – things that never were as low probability events as they imagined
Brexit winning, Trump as president, Boris as PM – how shocking that the omniscience of pretend-God be challenged by such unforeseen events. Late last year, I was aware from my acquaintance how much Economist-readers loved Fintan O’Toole’s ‘explanation’ that Brexit arose from the idiocy of backward-looking British voters (Fintan O’Toole: ‘Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain’, published November 2019). Fintan laughed when Brexit-supporting reviewers warned him to worry instead about a real ugliness in his own Southern Irish electorate – until he was again shocked by an Éire election result that was (regrettably but foreseeably) never such a low-probability event as he and EU-negotiation-supporting taoiseach Varadkar imagined. (Corbyn’s success in 2017 is one on-balance-hopeful analogy to draw; there are others.)
It is said of communists that they think their party is God – a God sadly lacking the attributes of forgiveness and absolution. People who have the sense to know communism is stupid can still be very wilfully deluded about how much they themselves understand and how unshocking it should be to be proved not merely wrong but clueless.
So what is the UK equivalent of ‘NeverTrumper’? We all know what ‘Guardian-reader’ means. Is it time to be aware what ‘Economist-reader’ can mean?
I stopped reading after the first sentence:
“I grew up Asian American in North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho, some of the whitest states in this country.”
My heuristic is that anyone using race as their frame of reference has got nothing to say that isn’t vile gibberish.
– Mike Fagan
Who would have thought that Sweden would end up being the last place in Europe where you could go for a beer?
writes an understandably surprised Swede (No lockdown please, we’re Swedish). In Sweden, the state tells people
how many slices of bread to eat per day … We still close liquor stores at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. The general idea is that if people were given the freedom and responsibility to figure out these things on their own, anarchy might follow.
And I can’t work out whether to call it ‘hardly less surprising’ or ‘barely more surprising’ that, at the other end of Europe, Portugal is (for now) following the same path. Instapunditer Sarah Hoyt was born and raised in Portugal but left because it lacked things like the first amendment, the second amendment and a lively SF culture.
The cynic in me is happy to suggest some less-than-libertarian explanations.
– Sarah Hoyt quotes the Portuguese Prime Minister explaining they avoided lockdown because the Portuguese are “more organized than other Europeans” – then adds
I have no idea what he’s smoking, or where he found it, but that’s potent stuff.
– Sweden has an unusually docile native population, an unusually different immigrant population and a political class that calls it bigotry for visible police actions to betray statistical differences between the two. Trying to enforce a lockdown is sure to offend many politically-correct regulations. Further, a society whose police seem already unable to control immigrant predilection for grenades and automatic weapons lacks the reserve of unused power needed to enforce a lockdown.
However the same attitudes that give me those thoughts also tell me that Swedish politicians will not only not speak them, even behind closed doors, they will have a hard time thinking them – which challenges my cynical explanation. Ordering the police and media not to mention the colour of suspects they seek lest the public see trends, yet thinking that
in a liberal democracy you have to convince and not command people
not to go to the pub, may seem absurd to logical libertarian and logical statist alike – but freedom owes much to the fact that humans are not logical. That Portugal may be too ill-organised to enforce statist solutions is another common way in which liberty survives its enemies, but at the moment it is not that they are trying and failing – they are actually not trying.
Thus we have our experimental controls – our null-hypothesis case studies. We’re doing a huge experiment to see how well locking down a nation can address a pandemic – an experiment whose costs’ ability to rise exponentially over time matches that of any disease graph. I don’t know how good or bad it will be for the Swedes and Portuguese, but it will be very good for the after-action report on this if a couple of moderately comparable nations stick with seeing what happens when you don’t lock everyone up.
Like it or not, every country is pursuing a herd immunity strategy, all they are doing is trying to manage the speed at which it happens.
– Perry de Havilland
True to its promise to leave no strategy untried that might help alleviate the coronavirus epidemic, Her Majesty’s Government, in accordance with the advice of the Lords Spiritual, has decreed that in penance for the sins that brought this plague upon us, all persons will now strictly observe the Lenten fast. Effective immediately, all confectionery, sweetmeats, and similar indulgent and luxurious foods will therefore be removed from sale in shops upon penalty of law. In particular the pagan custom of consumption of so-called “Easter eggs”, being a false admixture to the strictures of true religion, is henceforth prohibited.
It will be good for your souls.
OK, in case you were worried, what I just said was not true. Neither I nor the Bishops seek to use the law to deny the British public their choccy eggs. That’s the job of your local council.
Convenience stores are wrongly being told to limit the items they sell to just “essentials”, a trade body has warned.
Local newsagents, which are allowed to remain open under the Government’s guidelines, are facing interference from officials that are trying to restrict the range of goods they sell under lockdown measures.
Some shops have been told by police and local councils that Easter eggs are considered non-essential goods and must therefore be removed from shelves.
The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) blamed “overzealous enforcement and a misreading of the rules”.
Ridiculous as it was, with the drone-assisted “lockdown shaming” of walkers in Derbyshire, I could at least see what the police thought they were trying to achieve. But I really can see no motive other than reflex puritanism for trying to prohibit the sale of “nonessential goods”, particularly as they were on the shelves anyway. What good would it do anyone to make the shopkeepers lose a packet by being forbidden to sell stock they had purchased in happier times? This isn’t World War II. Britain’s food is not coming in by convoys subject to torpedo attack. In fact, if you can afford luxury foods, should you not buy them in preference to plainer things in order to leave more staple foods available for those who cannot afford anything else?
A vaccine would be great, a vaccine from ISRAEL would be awesome! Just imagine the lunatic conspiracy theories & of course, if the crazies refuse to use a ‘Jewish’ vaccine, that just means more for the rest of us! Take it away, Charles Darwin!
– Perry de Havilland
“There must logically be a point at which the cost of the containment measures, in terms of human welfare and even of fatalities, outweighs the cost of the virus.”
– Daniel Hannan.
Dr Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs likes to make various political/economic predictions, such as on Facebook, and he claims much of our political landscape has changed in ways that shred traditional markers on the map, saying that much of the argument now is no longer between those who want a Big State or a Small One, but about culture and identity. I like and agree with a lot of what he says, but I also think that the recent crisis, and the shock of what it says about the powers of the State, might – I hope – jolt people into realising that we libertarians, banging on about autonomy, property rights and so on, aren’t as irrelevant as is fashionable to claim. The Big State/Small State difference still counts for a lot. This argument should be made. Free societies, as we can point out, are often better at stepping up to change and emergencies than states often are. Not everyone worships at the altar of socialised medicine. And boy, have we learned the value of free press and scrutiny, if only by seeing what happens in China, when those things don’t exist.
Consider, even Formula 1 motor racing, that symbol of toxic masculine love of going very fast in noisy cars, is using its technical skills to meet the pandemic challenge. Libertarians should point out how entrepreneurial gusto, not the clunky hand of Whitehall, is what needs to be celebrated. And we certainly need to challenge the narrative of how marvellous China has been in locking things down. Turns out that it has been a shitshow.
Dr Davies has given a list of trends and forces he thinks will accelerate and turn as a result, and some of his predictions make me alarmed, others less so. Here are some of my own predictions. Dear readers: do add your own.
Here goes:
A big push to divert supply chains from China; more diversification around this. Maybe some pullback from just-in-time inventory but I don’t expect a total shift – the losses in efficiency and living standards are too big.
Less business travel and some tourism via air; more requirements that passengers carry medical data with them. Airport security to increasingly entail “medical security” and there will be demands that airports are more hygienic with cleaner air systems.
Continued “re-shoring” of some manufacturing. It is happening already because making stuff locally is getting easier with modern tech.
There will be pressure to monetise the enormous amounts of public debt. We could have a Japan-style stagnation lasting for two decades. Not sure if we get hyperinflation. Expect more commentary about gold, the need for hard money, etc.
Far more telecommuting and remote working. Some central business districts will have to adjust; some skyscrapers will struggle to fill up.
Suburbs and cars are back: who wants to live in a cramped city and rely on unhealthy, crammed public transport if you can live in a nice house, work from home and have a garden? The anti-car lobby has lost – people are glad they have cars. Issue: will the planning system free up to allow lots more homes with gardens etc to be built? I hope so.
The “woke” agenda is losing a lot of steam. It was happening already. Even remote learning will dent traditional educational attendance and power structures. That is a good thing.
The European Union and other transnational organisations, including the World Health Organisation, have been useless, and it turns out in the WHO’s case, all too cozy to China over Taiwan.
Some red tape will be rolled back; if people are going to have to put up with more nannying and state control in some areas they will want liberalisation elsewhere. Look at how some regulations have been canned to deal with the crisis. That could become permanent.
The actions of UK and other police in this pandemic have caused very bad publicity for the cops. It was bad already. It is getting worse.
Scientists who claim to have all the answers and claim the science is “settled” will encounter even more resistance. In a funny way this virus is bad news for the dark Greens. Extinction Rebellion’s vision of life has been rammed down people’s throats these past few weeks.
Attacks on Big Tech and demands for anti-trust will wane. The internet has had a good crisis. It kept us going.
The value of people with vocational skills, earned without vast sums of student debt, will appreciate; the education “bubble” of arts grads with high debt/lower salary will burst. This will also hurt the “woke” culture and the nonsense of what’s been happening on our campuses. Identity politics is not going away without a fight, however.
Classical liberals/libertarians haven’t really woken up fully to how much the victories of the 80s, 90s and even some of the Noughties have been compromised, sometimes by sheer complacency. We need to wake up, to do more of the intellectual heavy lifting. I hope the present situation galvanises more thought, activism and writing.
Celebrity culture looks to be on the back foot. It may return, but the Hollyweird culture is in really serious trouble. Crappy remakes of films, Weinstein, etc, etc.
People might actually be healthier: all that focusing on taking a daily walk, eating at home, thinking about “underlying health conditions”, might have a positive effect. It is a wake-up call.
Mainstream religions might get a revival. I wonder how many atheists have, sort of, prayed recently.
Public sports events, though, will attract sell-out crowds. Imagine if you are a rugby, cricket or football fan and denied the ability to see your teams and in the case of Liverpool, for example, robbed of the ability to be the unchallenged winner of its season. Those fans will be desperate to go back.
A video blog from Nigel, asking questions in his usual style about the lockdown and what it is for, police behaviour, and posing some questions about the UK’s relations with China. Then a China Uncensored video giving a view on the Red China ‘cure’ for coronavirus. He also has a good word for Stephen Kinnock going to see his Dad on his Old Man’s birthday.
A British politician calling for liberty, there is one.
And from China Uncensored, (a Taiwanese-backed channel I believe), a contrast on the American media’s soft touch on China with what has been going on.
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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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