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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It sometimes makes me wonder why so few people seem to draw the connections between stories in the media that cry out to be connected. Here is one example, to do with food:
The price of basic food items could rise by as much as five per cent this year because of miserable weather last autumn, the managing director of Waitrose has warned.
Mark Price said food price inflation is already hovering at three to three and a half per cent, but this is just “the tip of the iceberg” and prices could increase even more dramatically over the coming months.
Produce such as bread and vegetables will become up to five per cent more expensive because of poor crop yields leading to a shortage of supply, he warned.
Many farmers are reporting that they still have not planted crops for 2013 because of the torrential rainfall which caused flooding across parts of Britain late last year.
From the Daily Telegraph.
Then there is this item about the waste of food in some countries:
Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach. Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands.
Something is wrong with this picture. On the one hand, we are warned that food could be in much more scarce supply, hence the risk of skyrocketing prices; on the other, we produce oodles of the stuff and yet are wasting it, in various ways (poor storage, silly bureaucratic rules about sell-by dates, lack of basic knowledge about cooking, the ease of throwing out food rubbish.) It seems to me that inasmuch as there is a genuine problem, it is that we don’t have a full free market in food. If those who talk in horror about rich Westerners chucking out half-eaten meals really are disgusted by this, how much more disgusting are policies such as EU payments to farmers not to produce food under what is called “set aside”? (This is a policy pioneered by that champion of bad economic ideas, FDR, in the 1930s). And tax-subsidies for “biofuels” that distort agriculture markets are another glaring form of waste, surely. (It is also worth bearing in mind that state-subsidised farming is often also the most destructive from a sustainability point of view; the European Common Agricultural Policy saw the use of modern fertilisers and pesticides increase significantly).
If food prices rise due to a natural shift in the supply-demand imbalance, rather than due to the distortions of the State, then we wasteful Westerners will have to relearn some old habits, whether it be never leaving food on a plate and wise storage of our food. And just to finish on this thought: how much more severe would our shortages be, if, instead of being able to tap into a global supply of food, we had to rely on purely “local” produce, as the “locavores” would have us do?
On slightly tangential point, I read that a once-prominent opponent of GM foods has changed his mind and now admits that much of the opposition was not based on honest science and reasoning.
Not only that but feminist plays. In France, it is only fair to point out:
 The Times, 23 December 1912 p8 In La Femme Seule he discusses the position of a well-educated young girl who is forced by financial ruin and the lukewarmness of her betrothed to earn her own living.
Threrese, the heroine… finds employment as a manageress of women workers in her uncle’s factory. Here it is the economic selfishness of man that drives her from her work. The men in the factory object to female competition and strike.
Not that that doesn’t present itself with an opportunity for some cross-Channel point scoring:
The play served to show how slow France has been to respond to the feminist movement.
In comparison to England, that is. Which I find surprising. I know there has been a revolution when it comes to women in the workforce over the last 40 years, but a century ago? But if it was the case that women were entering the workforce and they were paying the newly-introduced income tax could that explain the demand for female suffrage?
By the way, the latest suffragist tactic is to pour acid into pillar boxes.
Correction 15/1/13 Income tax (in the UK) was not introduced just before 1912. It was introduced (on a permanent basis) by Peel in 1842.
David Thompson’s latest Elsewhere posting ends very entertainingly. He quotes Matt Welch, Jonah Goldberg and Victor Davis Hanson, before himself adding this very quotable paragraph:
For some, professions of egalitarianism and socialist belly fire are a kind of rhetorical chaff – a way to elevate oneself as More Compassionate Than Thou, while deflecting envy from below. (“Please don’t hate me for being richer than you. Look, over there – they have even more, or almost as much – let’s all hiss at them!”) Vicarious philanthropy – giving away freely other people’s earnings – is a remarkably effective ruse, so much so it seems to encourage a certain disregard for dissonance, as demonstrated, for example, by the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger in this comical exchange with Piers Morgan. And by the Guardian’s imperious class warrior Polly Toynbee, whose rhetoric was contrasted with her actual lifestyle and was promptly reduced to indignant spluttering on national television. Similar obliviousness is also displayed by the millionaire actor Jeremy Irons, who denounces consumerism and asks, “How many clothes do people need?” All while owning no fewer than seven houses, one of which is a peach-coloured castle. No, you’re not allowed to laugh. Because his wife is also very Green and “deeply socialist.”
Good knockabout stuff. It would seem that Piers Morgan has his uses.
But, there is always a danger with this way of arguing, where you challenge someone for not living in accordance with his or her own bad ideas. The danger being that you may forget to point out that they are bad ideas. Often, there is so much demanding that whoever it is should practice what he preaches, that it is forgotten what stupid preaching it is.
Thompson does not make this mistake, as his swipe at vicarious philanthropy illustrates, as do all the other postings on his site that criticise other bad ideas. But others do.
Polly Toynbee’s class warfare preaching would be just as wrong if she preached it while living in a cardboard box under a bridge, and it might also be worse, on account of being more persuasive. It is her preaching I object to, not her lifestyle.
Jeremy Irons owning seven houses isn’t going to cause our descendants to fry or starve to death, any more than will us masses wanting to have more frocks and suits and shirts than we could get by with. The fact that, having earned a ton of money in the movies, Irons chooses to invest in property in a big way, and then, having invested in it, chooses to live in quite a lot of it, is evidence that, despite the foolishness of his professed opinions, his actual opinions, the ones he acts on, are less foolish. This man certainly knows how to live!
If you demand consistency from people, be sure to be clear what sort of consistency you are demanding. I want Irons to carry on living as he wants to, using the money he has earned. I just want him to stop spouting unintelligent and uncharitable nonsense about how we poorer people ought to fret about our shopping habits. Let Polly remain unequally rich, and continue to enjoy her Italian holidays. Let her merely shut up about the goodness of enforced equality.
I am not saying that Thompson’s comments are wrong. Pointing out that the Toynbee and Irons lifestyles clash with their publicly expressed opinions is well worth doing. But the idea of doing this, which must never be lost sight of in all the complaints about hypocrisy, is not to shame these grandees into living differently. It is to shame them into talking less public nonsense.
This all too serious joke has steadily gained traction among the self anointed cognoscenti.
Probably one reason they think “Hope®” it will work is because it is “legal”.
We don’t make the loopholes. We just find them. The Treasury can’t print money on its own, because the money supply is supposed to be the strict purview of the Federal Reserve … but that might not be quite so strict after all, thanks to a coin-sized exception. Congress passed a law in 1997, later amended in 2000, that gives the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to mint platinum coins, and only platinum coins, in whatever denomination and quantity he or she wants. That could be $100, or $1,000, or … $1 trillion.
And we know that Congress has the power “to coin money and regulate the value thereof”, right? The Constitution says so, right?
→ Continue reading: To coin money and regulate the value thereof
I can not imagine anything that would give me more pleasure than to buy you a beer in a thousand years’ time.
– Michael Jennings, possibly exaggerating somewhat given the pleasure that might be imagined available over the next 1000 years.
Over at Neal Asher’s (more on him from me later, once I have finished his novel) blog, I see this entertaining Boris Johnson quote about fracking:
The extraction process alone would generate tens of thousands of jobs in parts of the country that desperately need them. And above all, the burning of gas to generate electricity is much, much cleaner – and produces less CO2 – than burning coal. What, as they say, is not to like?
In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news. Beware this new technology, they wail. Do not tamper with the corsets of Gaia! Don’t probe her loamy undergarments with so much as a finger — or else the goddess of the earth will erupt with seismic revenge. Dig out this shale gas, they warn, and our water will be poisoned and our children will be stunted and our cattle will be victims of terrible intestinal explosions.
Which is all very good except that, as Tim Worstall is forever pointing out, jobs are a cost. I can see why Boris, a politician, would see votes in talking up the thousands of jobs, but I hope he understands this. When he chooses between scheme A and scheme B, I would hope he does not pick the most expensive, more labour intensive one.
And it is unadulterated good news. The greens’ opposition to fracking may be working now, but the political will will be there the moment the first blackouts hit. So I do not imagine things will get much worse than that, and then there is enough energy for a few more technological revolutions.
Over at the National Review’s Corner blog, Charles C. W. Cooke has this smart observation to make about the extent governments claim they will go to eliminate risk:
No free society worth its salt operates anywhere close to the principle that a law that could save “one life” is automatically worth passing, or that “actions” that result in “only saving one life” are axiomatically “worth taking.” Holding all school classes in lead-lined, bulletproof underground panic rooms would probably save “one life” over the next few years, but that doesn’t mean we should do it; banning Ibuprofen would probably save “one life” in the next few years, but that doesn’t mean we should do it; limiting access to trousers and bananas and televisions and wardrobes and swimming pools would almost definitely save “one life” over the course of a given year, but, again, that doesn’t mean that we should do it. And so on and so forth. The question, as ever, is whether the cost is worth it. The “one life” canard is an attempt to bypass that and appeal to emotion. Depressingly enough, it’s relatively effective.
The “one life” idea is especially silly in the context of the gun debate because it can be used both ways equally productively. Almost every day, an American saves his own life — or someone else’s life — with a privately held firearm. Last week, for example, a mother in Georgia used a .38 revolver to protect herself and her children from an intruder. Taking Joe Biden’s line — which he appears to have inherited from the president — one could quite easily construct a case to issue all mothers with revolvers whether they like it or not. Wait, you object to having a gun in the house? You think that arming all of America’s mothers sounds expensive? You’re not sure that’s the best idea anyway. Civil liberties? Yes, yes, but if it saves just one life . . .
Indeed. And as he goes on to say, the UK government in the past – and still – engages in the same sort of behaviour. (Often, this is done in the name of protecting children, playing to the understandable desire of adults to protect youngsters.) Then there is that old friend, The Law of Unintended Consequences. A risk-averse society creates new risks, which of course fall on different shoulders from those presumably being protected by the measures, although often people who are supposed to be protected by bans on X or Y can suffer in other ways.
We cannot create a no-risk society, and even if we could, it would be horrifying. Indeed, the only place where humans exist without risk is in a grave.
One of Obama’s apparatchiks has said that Britain’s membership of the EU was in the American interest.
Two responses spring to mind.
The first was… So what? This remark was obviously aimed the the dismal British government but furthering ‘the American interest’ should be very low on the list of priorities of any government that is not located in Washington DC. So even if it was true (and frankly nothing could be further from the truth), this should be of trivial import to anyone in the Sceptred Isles.
The second was… ok, so how much are you willing to pay for that “US interest”? If the US interest is served by continued British membership of the sclerotic EU, then perhaps the hapless US taxpayer should get shafted for, oh, lets say 50% of the cost?
Child attacked the very idea that one man could own another and in so doing enunciated the heart of libertarianism. “The personal liberty of one man can never be the property of another,” she wrote. “In slavery there is no mutual agreement; for in that case, it would not be slavery. The negro has no voice in the matter—no alternative presented to him—no bargain is made. The beginning of his bondage is the triumph of power over weakness…One man may as well claim an exclusive right to the air another man breathes, as to the possession of his limbs and faculties. Personal freedom is the birthright of every human being.”
These are the words of Lydia Maria Childs, as remembered in a nice article by those folk at The Skeptical Libertarian.
There has been something of a kerfuffle recently – over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians site – about the role, or perhaps lack of involvement of – women in what can be loosely called the libertarian movement. On one level, this strikes me as a bit misplaced in terms of a concern, since I don’t really think that the circle of libertarians that I have moved in to have been particularly male dominated. And in general, the history of classical liberal thought in the 19th and 20th centuries has its prominent women figures such as Ayn Rand (even if she rejected the term); Rose Wilder Lane, Isobel Paterson, and more recently, Wendy McElroy and Virginia Postrel.
And given how women continue to be oppressed in parts of the world – such as in Saudi Arabia, to take one extreme example – I would argue that pro-liberty views ought to be particularly appealing to women, all things considered.
Well done Jeff Wise at Slate. You have managed to notice what has been obvious to absolutely everybody who has been looking at demographic trends and population projections for at least the last 20 years. Specifically, growth in the world’s population is in fact slowing down, and the population will start to contract in aggregate within a small number of decades, and is already doing so in some places.
As a less scientific but still useful, rough rule of thumb on demographic matters, I would recommend taking any prediction made by Paul Erlich in the first half of the 1970s and assuming the precise opposite has happened since.
Public Policy Polling (PPP) has released the results of a poll pitting Congress against various unlikeables, including lice, brussel sprouts, colonoscopies, NFL replacement refs, traffic jams, the country of France, and the band Nickelback.
– Reason magazine blog. You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.
You won’t find better proof that television is a captive marketplace. You can only watch it in ways The Industry allows, and on devices it provides or approves.
– Doc Searls
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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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