I support the Public Sector in the UK going on strike… in fact I hope they all stay out on strike for a really, really, really long time.
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There are some libertarians who believe there may be something to AGW, and see using markets the way to mitigate the consequences. There are also libertarians (and conservatives and lefties) who think AGW is a preposterous fraud, and who naturally have no interest in finding solutions to a non-existent problem. But AGW per se is not a ‘libertarians vs. non-libertarians’ issue. You can still be a libertarian and think there is something to AGW, you are just going to see the ways of dealing with it very differently to command-and-control statists. – Perry de Havilland Bonus SQOTD, also from the same raucous beer and grappa fuelled discussion the other night… Let me answer by rephrasing your question: “Do I trust a bunch of lay observers more than I trust a bunch of academics… academics whose professional acceptance and funding will be put at risk if they commit heresy against the True Faith and suggest AGW might not in fact be the indisputable truth?” July 10th, 2014 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It is amazing the establishment is still peddling the whole nonsensical ‘climate change’ fraud. I guess they did not get the memo that people outside the BBC/Guardian bubble have noticed that the Emperor has no clothes. July 9th, 2014 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
Perhaps it is a measure of my cynicism but this does not surprise me in the slightest. Indeed my only surprise is that anyone is surprised:
This was the Tory party, but of course it matters not one iota which political party it is, for they are all cut from the same cloth. July 8th, 2014 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I asked my stockbroker why part of my dividend payments were being witheld, despite the fact that I had filled in form W-8 declaring that I am not a US citizen. It turns out that there is a tax witholding on certain payments to foreign persons, including dividends. I am lucky that the UK has a treaty with the US meaning this is a mere 15% instead of 30%. I imagine this highway robbery marginally reduces foreign investments. I wonder what interesting forms of taxation will surprise me next. July 7th, 2014 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
No legal document can save a society from appointing its own slave masters if enough people are determined to do so. Laws alone are not enough. – Perry de Havilland, discussing constitutions. July 7th, 2014 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit linked to this: Razr Burn: My Month with 2004’s Most Exciting Phone. Apparently, having become accustomed to smartphones, the lady found the ten year old Motorola Razr V3 un-smart. Lady, that ain’t a 2004 phone. This is a 2004 phone. OK, it would have been nice at this point to download a picture of my phone. But one can’t do that with the Sagem myX-2, the only cell phone that a person of discernment need ever own. The myX-2 does not hamper my appreciation of the world by tempting me to take photographs. Nor does it download things, preferring to keep itself pure. I believe that it is capable of going to look at the internet, at warp 48.3, I am told, but in the decade since I first owned this jewel among telephonic devices, my affairs have never been so disarranged as to oblige me to attempt this feat. It sends text messages. There is a thing called “predictive text”, but I prefer to make my own decisions. It has a picture puzzle in which one does something or other with a grid of numbers. Of course technology has moved on and no one nowadays would play anything so primitive. It falls into rivers. It gets left in the saddlebag of a bicycle stored in a lean-to shed for a month. It is stroked lovingly by people who had one in 2003. It distracts jurors from the case in hand when all the mobiles have to be put in a safe and it is the coolest one there. It bounces. It will be replaced when it finally dies which is sure to happen by 2008 at the latest. You can telephone people on it. July 6th, 2014 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 4th, 2014 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Economic progress tends to increase insofar as the savings result in a larger supply of capital goods, which serves to increase production, including the further production of capital goods. The rate of return on capital tends to fall because the larger expenditure for capital goods (and labor) shows up both as larger accumulations of capital and as an increase in the aggregate amount of costs of production in the economic system, which serves to reduce the aggregate amount of profit. Our problems today result largely from government policies that serve to hold down saving and the demand for capital goods. Among these policies are the corporate and progressive personal income taxes, the estate tax, chronic budget deficits, the social security system, and inflation of the money supply. To the extent that these policies can be reduced, the demand for and production and supply of capital goods will increase, thereby restoring economic progress, and the aggregate amount and average rate of profit will fall. – Reisman is dealing with Piketty and his assertion that because returns on capital can outpace economic growth in general, that this is some sort of bad thing, to be stopped, banned and generally supressed. Perry Metzger of this blog has already done a lot to demonstrate the economically insane nature of Piketty’s analysis. In summation, if you want to increase incomes, then an essential step is to stop attacking capitalists (not to be confused with crony capitalists tapping the public sector for privileges, etc). Reisman has another devastating take-down on Piketty and his ideas on capital, at the Ludwig Von Mises blog. (Thanks to Paul Marks, frequent Samizdata commenter, for the pointer.) July 4th, 2014 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Let me get this straight. The World Cup is being held in Brazil. Prior to this tournament there was a ban on consumption of alcohol inside stadia in Brazil, but FIFA insisted that the ban be overturned because one of their sponsors is a brand of beer and their contractual relationship with the brewer of this beer required that it be on sale inside the stadia during the World Cup. Fans at these matches have apparently been buying this beer and getting unbelievably drunk. The impressive cogitative processes operating in the brains of senior FIFA officials are now just starting to deduce that there might have been a reason for this ban in the first place. Soon, Russia is authoritarian and corrupt. Also, it is hot in Qatar in summer. July 3rd, 2014 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been watching with mild interest as a furore brews over a very pleasant looking US huntress called Kendall Jones, posing with a variety of African animals who have snuffed it. And so in this intolerant age in which we live, there are howls of outrage that she dares post pictures of her prey, with demands that facebook ban her. One might be moved to speculate how many of the people complaining will then go a stuff their faces with factory farmed meat products produced in what are effectively concentration camps for animals, and yet see no irony in their indignant outrage. No prizes for guessing where my sympathies lie…
July 3rd, 2014 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
I, and I am sure many other readers of and writers of Samizdata, have been following the career of Steve Baker MP, ever since he was elected MP for Wycombe in 2010. However, the last posting I did here about Baker elicited understandable scepticism from commenters about whether Baker would stick to his free market principles long enough to make any difference. Yeah, sure, he is now on the Treasury Select Committee. Big deal. Baker, like all the others, said doubters, would soon go native. Well maybe he will, but he hasn’t yet. Not if this City A.M. report by Peter Spence about Baker’s latest sayings and doings is anything to go by:
That bit about wanting people to “question whether this is actually a free market” is the bit that really matters here, I think. Clearly, Baker wants all such questioners to realise that the answer is: “No”. Much of the problem with the world’s financial system these days is the most observers of it don’t even seem to think of it as a nationalised, government dominated system in the same way that tractor production was a nationalised, government dominated system in the old USSR. It is simply inconceivable to them that “money” could, by its very nature, be anything but a nationalised industry, so much so that to think of it as a “nationalised industry” is beyond them, because even to use such a phrase is to allude at least to the possibility – the thinkability – of a non-nationalised, free market version of the same industry. This is not a debate about how the nationalised industry of money should be managed, so much as a debate about the fact that it is a nationalised industry. Or, it would be such a debate, if only people like Steve Baker MP can manage to get such a debate started. No doubt many Soviet tractor-makers felt similarly about what they did. That too, they were sure, just had to be run by the government, or else tractor making would descend into a black hole of chaos and impossibility and absurdity. The idea of a “free market in tractors” was, for such people, literally unthinkable. And millions in the West mocked all this nonsense. So, why do the descendants of such mockers – literal and intellectual – not mock their own Central Bankers now, just as Central Tractorers were mocked back then? People may respond to Baker’s challenge by saying: “Yes, it is a nationalised industry, and a good thing too.” But for people even to talk like that would be a huge shift in thinking, because the fact of monetary nationalisation would have been accepted, even as it is being defending. Until the metacontext (to use a favourite word here) of this debate is changed, free market capitalism will go on getting the blame for all that is wrong about the world’s financial system. And the “solution” will continue to be to restrict free markets in financial matters ever more ferociously. Keep it up Mr Baker. You have not gone native yet. And you have an admiring fan club out here that continues to notice and continues to applaud. July 2nd, 2014 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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