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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This situation begs a huge question: what is justice for? The idea that people who stand accused of something have the right to have those allegations tested is being fundamentally undermined by this new form of public showtrial. In the past, showtrials were used by authoritarian governments to establish a ‘truth’, which was convenient for their political purposes. Today, the showtrial is used to validate and confirm the experiences of those making accusations. The showtrial has become the most effective way of telling people that their story has been believed by society at large, even when the laws of that country prevent a formal trial from taking place. In a society in which such therapeutic validation has become so central, what value do we accord justice, fairness and objectivity? Principles which have, for centuries, been cornerstones of Western systems of justice are now being done away with.
– Luke Gittos, in an article entitled ‘Cosby: convicted by social-media showtrial‘
The European law gives individuals and institutions the right to demand that search engines such as Google must de-list postings containing ‘outdated’ or ‘irrelevant’ information. The Euro authorities insist that this cannot be construed as censorship, since the material will not actually be removed from the internet – it will simply not be linked to by Google and Co anymore. When plans for these regulations were first announced in 2012, the European Commission’s vice-president said: ‘It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history.’ That sounds like rewriting history. If material is not listed by search engines, it is effectively invisible to most online and ceases to exist as public information.
No, no, say the authorities, of course we are not banning this controversial book! We are simply ordering all libraries and bookshops to remove it from their shelves and websites forthwith. You will still be at liberty to read it – if you can find a copy anywhere, or even spot a reference to its existence…
– Mick Hume
The great irony is that, unlike many of today’s champagne socialists and shisha-jihadists my entire life has been a prototype of their archetypal aggrieved Muslim. Unlike the Guardian’s private school, Oxbridge-educated journalist David Shariatmadari, I am a state school-educated Muslim and racial minority. I have been stabbed at by neo-Nazis, falsely arrested at gunpoint by Essex police, expelled from college, divorced, estranged from my child, and tortured in Egyptian prison, and mandatorily profiled. I’ve had my DNA forcibly taken at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 Laws, which deprive terror suspects of the right to silence at UK ports of entry and exit, among much else. I’ve been blacklisted from other countries. I am every grievance regressive leftists traditionally harp on. Yet their first-world bourgeois brains seem to malfunction because I refuse to spew theocratic hate, or fit their little “angry Muslim” box. Yet they talk to me about privilege, and non-fat lattes?
– Maajid Nawaz in an absolutely storming article. Highly recommended.
From about the victory of 1997 – in the last few years of the 1990s and the first few years of the 2000s – the British Labour Party strode with immense power, strength, and confidence. It won huge victories over its enemies, asserted itself with great strength and confidence, but was not afraid of getting a little dirty when this was necessary to achieve its agenda. It was not always popular with everyone, but it looked unbeatable and invincible. It and its leadership were not liked by everyone, but what had been achieved had to be respected. By the time of the defeat of 2015, though, Labour was a pathetic shadow of what it had been. After the defeat, it seemed inexplicable that anyone had every thought victory was possible, athough many had (strangely) predicted it. Led and managed by incompetent losers, it was very hard to see a way forward. Although the leaders who had overtly brought it to this point had been deposed, the culture of failure and incompetence remained in place, and their replacements looked likely to be worse.
From about the victory of 1997 – in the last few years of the 1990s and the first few years of the 2000s – the Australian cricket team strode with immense power, strength, and …
Reports of company meetings are usually a bit dull – those from a hundred years ago even more so. So why I bothered to read this one I don’t know. It concerns Farrow’s Bank, a small bank that despite there being a war on seems to be doing just fine.
“So”, I wondered, “what happened to it?” My assumption was that it got swallowed up in one of the gazillion or so mergers that have taken place in the banking sector in the last century or so.
Well, not quite. Actually, in 1920 it went bust. Spectacularly.
It turned out that at no point in its 13 or so years in existence as a publicly-listed company had it made a profit. By the very time this company meeting was taking place losses were routinely being covered up by inflating asset values.
So, were there any tell-tale signs that all was not as it appeared? Obviously with accounts that were largely fictional it would have been difficult to tell from the numbers. But were there other clues?
It is difficult to tell from this distance but a few things stick out. The first is that, the chairman and founder, Thomas Farrow, prior to founding the bank wrote a book entitled The Moneylender Unmasked in which he criticized the methods of moneylenders. Was he, perhaps, a gamekeeper turned poacher? – someone who had worked out all the tricks of the dishonest and then applied them for his own benefit. I doubt it. More likely, I suspect, that his ideas were nonsense in the first place and the acid test of their commercial implementation simply proved it.
The second is that one of the depositors described the Chairman’s speeches as “sanctimonious” and “treacly”. Does this, perhaps, suggest a lack of attention to the business of making money?
The third, was his fullsome praise for the then Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George. Businessmen don’t usually praise the government, far less individual government ministers. I could say a lot more about that particular minister but I’ll save that for another time.
 The Times 5 August 1915 p2
Krasimira is gloomy about the future. She doesn’t think Greece will implement the necessary reforms and will, in the end, have to leave the eurozone. As ever, she views the situation through a Bulgarian prism. “Greece has received €30 billion from Europe,” she says. (In fact the figure is far higher). “That’s more than seven other Balkan countries have received put together — I saw it on Bulgarian TV. You’ve got to pay back your debts in order to take more loans. If I ask you for a loan you’ll give it to me; if I can’t pay it back you wont give me any more.”
She has a final comment — on the EU subsidies. “In Bulgaria the state doesn’t give subsidies to the farmers.” She points to some sprinklers watering the garden. “So what you see here: water being wasted, you’ll never see in Bulgaria. My brother has 2,200 hectares there and grows corn and wheat and he is not allowed to overly water them, he has to rely on the weather. If it’s not good he has a problem.”
“Yes, the subsidies have made Greek farmers spoiled and wasteful. But since Bulgaria joined the EU and started receiving subsidies you’ve seen the same thing — people receiving subsidies and using them to buy houses and consumers goods instead of investing the money.”
The EU as resource curse: it’s an old tale — and one that seems to have had disastrous effects for Greece, which for years grew fat on easy money. Now in its time of crisis it must watch its poorer, leaner neighbor to the north further compound its deep, almost existential, despair.
– David Patrikarako, from the article Greece vs Bulgaria
An economics joke, drawn to my attention by my friend Jesse Forgione:
Krugman and Bernanke are walking down the street and see a pile of dog shit. Bernanke says “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars to eat that pile of shit.” Krugman does it, gets paid, and they keep walking. After a while they see another pile of shit on the road. Seeing an opportunity for revenge, Krugman says “Tell you what, I’ll give YOU twenty grand to eat that pile of shit.” Bernanke does it, Krugman gives him back the money, and they keep walking. After a while Bernanke says “I’m feeling pretty sick. We both ate shit and neither of us is any richer.” Krugman answers “You’re missing the bigger picture. We’ve increased GDP by forty thousand dollars and created two jobs.”
So many economists today spend more and more time mastering higher-level mathematics and econometric techniques that they simply never master basic microeconomics. These economists (from my reading of him, I judge Piketty to be among them) take their fluency in statistics and their skill at quantitative-data gathering for being a fluency in, and skill at doing, economics. They are mistaken. And while their error is too-often masked to the general public by their formal credentials as professional economists, their error is never hidden from genuinely skilled economists such as Deirdre McCloskey.
– Don Boudreaux, of Cafe Hayek. The whole item is worth a read, as is the McCloskey item at the Cato Institute to which he links. And let’s not forget Samizdata’s own Perry Metzger’s marvellous “shoe event horizon” takedown of Piketty a few months ago.
While it is perfectly reasonable to expect companies to obey the law in the countries in which they operate, the rage against Uber highlights how stifling regulation of economic life can be. Prior to the emergence of Uber, complaints of never being able to get a cab during peak times were common in every major city in the world. Uber’s sidestepping of licensing laws and other regulations that limit enterprise has enabled it to increase supply and meet demand.
What’s more, Uber’s cheaper fares have saved customers money, expanded our transport options and provided a source of income for a whole new sector of drivers. While the debate about Uber drivers’ pay and employment rights rumbles on, it is clear that banning the service, and forcing these drivers to go through the same costly licensing systems as everyone else, does no one any favours.
It is the competition that Uber provides that is driving its popularity with drivers and customers. But this is precisely what is enraging licensed taxi drivers.
– Rob Harries
This item at the EconLog blog caught my eye. It has the ring of truth about it:
And yet, good for him, this is exactly the outcome of his short time in Greek government. As a Minister, he has nothing to exhibit as success. But an intense countenance, an elaborately casual look, and his colourful prose makes him a perfect fit for the world of celebrities. I suppose this is another proof of the immense powers of “commodification” of global capitalism.
The author, Alberto Mingardi, is writing about the “cool dude” Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. The man’s rather strained form of Marxism will, so the author of the piece, hurt him not at all because his targets are, for different reasons, ones that aren’t particularly sympathetic, such as the German government, and Brussels.
The point, though, its that being a failed socialist finance minister isn’t enough to get that sort of media celeb status without other ingredients. After all, there are quite a few of such people and in some cases, such as former UK chancellor Gordon Brown, he is about as trendy as flared jeans; he has all the media appeal of steel reinforced concrete. The Greek chap has the looks and demeanour of an outsider, even if, in reality, he is as much a part of the Big Government class as the rest of them. He understood that people fall for all this bollocks about wearing leather jackets, riding a motorbike and not appearing to be A Suit.
And back in the UK, assuming that Jeremy Corbyn (not exactly the sort of name one associates with horny-handed coal miners or ship-builders) becomes leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, and leads Labour into the sort of disaster widely foretold, he has a career as a media celeb sorted: the ageing geography-teacher schtick with the beard, loose jackets and references to Tony Benn.
I see no advantage to the American system at this point. We’ve had so much “yeah it says that but they didn’t really mean what the words say” reinterpretation of our founding document it’s essentially been rendered meaningless. The president can do whatever he wants, from starting wars to snooping though your computer to prior restraints on what you can say to using the apparatus of the bureaucracy in a campaign aimed at burying you under audits and investigations.
– Samizdata commenter Eric
Republican politicians stink. This is because real Republicans don’t go into politics. We have a life…
Democrats, on the other hand, are brilliant politicians. And I mean that as a vicious slur.
– P. J. O’Rourke
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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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