Mankind will never enjoy the full social, economic and psychological perfection of the Inuit hunting group, as portrayed by First Peoples — but then real Inuit hunting groups don’t enjoy that either.
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The latest wave of communicational cleverness has made face-to-face meetings to spread good ideas both easier to organise, and more necessary to organise. Easier, obviously. More necessary because it now takes much clever thinking and cooperative enterprise to get good ideas heard and acted upon in this new media hubbub, just as it used to when the media were dominated by a few megaliths. There was, I now realise, a joyous interlude when good ideas had the run of the blogosphere and those who might have been using the blogosphere to spread bad ideas instead mostly just waited for the good ideas to go away. But now the bad ideas are back with a vengeance, never having gone away – just having been temporarily heckled a bit, and now different skills and energies are needed to get the good stuff said and done, and in much the same considerable quantities as two decades ago. There are now so many meetings, just in London, of the kind I am inclined to be attending, that I myself have taken to sending out reminders when my own last-Friday-of-the-month meetings are imminent, and I greatly appreciate it when others do the same. Nobody has yet complained to me about my reminders. Several have said thanks. (My speaker this month, by the way, will be Samizdata’s own Rob Fisher, who will talk about the impact that open source software is having on the world.) So it was that I was very glad to receive this, this morning:
More here, and what I earlier said about this event here: here. Another meeting I will soon be attending is this evening, organised by Libertarian Home at the Rose and Crown in Southwark, and addressed by our own Adriana Lukas. Details here. Get there Reminding people about your meeting involves the same kind of humility that is involved in repeating good ideas. People don’t necessarily hear things the first time you say them, and if they do they often forget them, especially when they now have so many other things to be attending to. And even when they have told you that they will definitely be attending your meeting, your meeting is not likely to be the biggest thing in their lives, and they are entirely liable to forget all about it until several days later. Unless they get a reminder. April 4th, 2013 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 David Stockman has written a controversial Op Ed piece entitled Sundown in America that was published last Sunday in the New York Times. I’ll quote the opening paragraphs to give a taste of the content:
I’m not certain I agree with all of it — his political prescriptions towards the end seem especially suspect — but it is absolutely worth a read. Update: Stockman addresses critics, including Paul Krugman (who in typical fashion fired off a torrent of mocking ad hominems instead of a response), in this interview with Marketwatch. April 3rd, 2013 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
It appears that it isn’t merely the U.K.’s “Conservative” party that has difficulty recalling 2008, a year now so distant as to be beyond the memory of living politicians: Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit I’ll give the devil his due — Marx said it best in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon when he noted that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” April 3rd, 2013 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is only one question that needs to be asked in the debate about Welfare Benefits…and that is ‘What can we afford?’. When there is ‘no money left’ what can we afford? That seems to have escaped the BBC who continue to question Coalition welfare reforms and the need for them on the basis that we have an endless supply of money. The BBC et al ask only ‘What do they need?’ with no requirement as to answer how to pay for those ‘needs’. That may seem easy for an organisation that doesn’t have to work for its funding but in the real world that’s a model that is the stuff of dreams… imagine being able to force your customers to pay for your goods even if they don’t use them…and in advance as well. April 3rd, 2013 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Hoppean position on immigration is illogical; you do not reduce the scope of the state by increasing it and the number of tasks it undertakes. We should be looking at ways to limit the damage and cost of government now, and not sit in ivory towers trying to fudge a philosophical position that takes away the right of free association. April 2nd, 2013 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
After Hurricane Sandy struck last fall, “Today” reporter Jeff Rossen did an exposé on how some contractors were “preying on” homeowners. How? By performing repair work without the proper licenses. Rossen found several contractors who lacked home-improvement licenses, but only one consumer who had been taken advantage of – and that was two months before Sandy struck. His big story boiled down to the fact that some Sandy-related tree removal and home repair work was carried out without prior government permission. But wait – does Rossen have a license to practice journalism? Does he think journalists should be licensed? I reached out to Rossen by email. “What can I do for you?” he wrote back. But when I put those questions to him, he never responded – much like the unlicensed contractors he caught on camera. How scandalous! April 1st, 2013 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“William Shakespeare evaded tax and illegally stockpiled food during times of shortage so he could sell it at high prices, academics have claimed“. April 1st, 2013 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night being the last Friday of March, there was a meeting at my place, as already flagged up here. But it was also Good Friday, so I did a bit of extra hustling and emailing around beforehand to ensure some kind of turnout. It worked. Great talk, and there were nine libertarian-inclined Londoners present in the form of: two Americans, a German, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a New Zealander and three Englishmen. I neglected photography at the January meeting, which I already regret, and did hardly any better at the end of February. This time I tried harder, this being one is my favourite snaps from last night:
Those are two of the three Englishmen who were present, the other being me. On the right there is speaker for the evening Richard Carey, and on the left Simon Gibbs, both of Libertarian Home fame. Gibbs was not rudely ignoring the conversation and catching up on his emails; he was looking up names and titles that were being mentioned in the conversation. I particularly like the potato crisp in Carey’s left hand at the very bottom of the picture. The talk was everything that I personally was hoping for. There was lots of biographical detail of who the key early Austrians were (Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser) and what kind of intellectual context they were operating in and what they said. And then the same for the later figures of note (von Mises, Rothbard). Other twentieth century figures were mentioned. Given how admiringly Carey spoke about him, I was particularly intrigued by Frank Fetter, only a name to me until now. Carey made no attempt to disguise the fact that he is a recent arrival to the task of getting his head round Austrian Economics, which for me was a feature rather than a bug, just as I thought it would be. And he made no attempt to suggest that he understood more than he actually did about the subject. His talk entirely lacked that sub-agenda that you so often sense with some speakers, that half the point of telling the story is to tell the story, but the other half of the point is to prove how very clever and well informed the speaker is, more so than he actually is. That Carey had no time for such nonsense only made me admire his intellect all the more. I had been expecting that the abstract theorising about what it all meant, what the intellectual guts of it all consisted of, would come at the end. The economic way of getting stuff versus the political way, trade versus stealing, individualism versus collectivism, the subjectivity of value, and so forth. Actually that bit came, at some length, at the beginning, so much so that I at first feared that all that biographical detail that I had been so looking forward to would be somewhat skated over. But all ended well, and I learned a great deal. I did not record this talk in any way. However, Simon Gibbs, the man on the left in the picture above, has already invited Richard Carey to do a repeat performance of this talk for Libertarian Home, and a video camera will presumably then be running. Meanwhile, I am very happy for Carey to have given this talk a first outing in friendly surroundings, and for him to get some early feedback on it. I find that I am making a point of getting speakers to speak about things they’ve not spoken about before, but will undoubtedly be speaking about again, for just these sorts of reasons. Two books were mentioned in the course of the discussion afterwards that I intend to investigate further. Christian Michel mentioned this collection of lectures by Michel Foucault, in one of which he apparently said something embarrassingly (given the kind of people who were listening) nice about the free market as the only place where freedom actually happens, or some such surprising thing. I’ve already emailed Christian asking for chapter and verse of the quote in question. And second, Aiden Gregg (who is an academic psychologist and who has already been fixed to speak at a later one of these meetings) mentioned the writings of somebody called Larken Rose, a new name to me, and in particular this book, which appears to cover similar ground, albeit in a somewhat different style, to that discussed in Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority, which has been written about here recently. Evenings like this don’t have any immediate world-changing impact, but every little helps. March 30th, 2013 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
For the first time ever, labourers were able to purchase cheap goods for themselves. The first factories focused on mass production of cheap goods for the poor. Shoes, for example, were produced for the proletariat – the rich bought made-to-measure shoes. This was different from France, where the government’s mercantilist product standards, designed to uphold quality, ensured that nothing was produced for the poor at all. In France, mercantilism continued to be state policy for much longer than in England. This is the reason why industrialisation took fifty more years to arrive on France’s shores. – This is a typical “I did not know that” moment from J. P. Floru‘s excellent new book Heavens on Earth: How To Create Mass Prosperity, from the chapter about the British industrial revolution. Well, I myself did not know it. If you did know this particular thing about shoes, you will still probably find a hundred other such titbits in this book that you did not know. In an equal-but-opposite way, this made me think of how we can now buy excellent yet vastly-cheaper-than-before spectacles on the internet, that being a case of a made-to-measure product becoming available to all at a mass production price. Besides the world-changing success story that was British industrialisation, Floru writes about: the USA and West Germany just after WW2, Hong Kong, China, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. The miseries of despotism are not glossed over, but the inevitable failure of statist economic policies and the almost automatic benefits of free market policies, provided only that you can make them stick, are made unmistakably clear. I hope, Real Soon Now, to be supplying a longer posting here about this fine book, along the lines of the five star reactions to it here. Short version: it is a fine book. March 29th, 2013 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Money, when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be the money of the principal; it is then the money of the banker, who is bound to an equivalent by paying a similar sum to that deposited with him when he is asked for it…The money placed in the custody of a banker is, to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases; he is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it; he is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in hazardous speculation; he is not bound to keep it or deal with it as the property of his principal; but he is, of course, answerable for the amount, because he has contracted.” Detlev Schlichter, quoting a 19th Century ruling about the status of bank deposits in the UK. It is, in fact, a sobering thought that many members of the general public might not be fully aware of what actually happens to their deposits, and be aware that to all intents and purposes, they do not “own” their deposits. Let’s just say that for a lot of people, the Cyprus episode has been a learning experience about the fundamental nature of what banks, today, actually are and do. March 27th, 2013 | 84 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I want a “leave me alone” society — one where Christian schools can turn people away for rejecting their doctrine, just as gay rights groups can reject those who don’t share their beliefs. I don’t want us all to get along — not because I’m misanthropic (well, not just because I’m misanthropic), but because I know that “consensus” is usually a fancy word for muting minority viewpoints. I want us all to be free to be annoyed with each other from our separate corners. Is that too much to ask?” He’s writing about Michael Bloomberg, who is up there with Hugh Grant and George Galloway in my current “rogues’ gallery”. Competition for membership of the gallery is proving quite competitive at the moment.
March 27th, 2013 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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