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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Occasionally a taxi driver will complain to me about the costs of licensing or the expensive safety test he is about to send his car in for. I always suggest that there is no need for taxi licensing at all. The taxi driver does not like this one bit. Of course not: the main purpose of licensing is to restrict supply and keep prices high.
This is rarely admitted. Instead we are warned of the dangers of unlicensed taxis. And dangers there are, but it is nothing that can not be solved with private certification schemes or branding.
The makers of a smartphone app called Uber are currently having various battles with taxi licensing authorities. They want to make it easier for people to order and pay for taxis and presumably in return take a cut of the fares. Price controls, metering and rules about how drivers are paid are getting in their way.
Meanwhile in Chennai, auto-rickshaws (known elsewhere as tuk tuks) are not metered. There is a campaign to have meters installed in them to fix the prices along with “proper” regulation and licensing. One problem people are complaining about is high prices; another is the behaviour of drivers, such as choosing customers and forcing people to share rides. These problems suggest to me that there is a shortage of auto-rickshaws, but my friend from Chennai disagrees. She explains that there are plenty of drivers, but they agree amongst themselves who will take which passenger so that passengers can not choose between drivers to get a better deal. This sounds like union behaviour, and an obvious question with perhaps an obvious answer is: what stops drivers operating outside of the union?
Here is a typical comment from the Missing Meter Facebook page:
the auto stand in my area itself (near perungudi bus stop – OMR)…… they will ask triple the charge if they see me in urge of going (dressed like professional)…. they will not let the autos to stop which are passing by… so we will end up in negotiating with those guys & pay atleast double the amount of real charge… apprx – 20 rs / km… this happens almost all the time….
Establishing free markets is never easy.
Well, contrary to my title it actually does matter a damn who wins the US election, even if policy-wise they are largely fungible.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has called for scrapping President Barack Obama’s 2010 U.S. healthcare law, said in remarks aired on Sunday that he likes key parts of “Obamacare” despite his party’s loathing of it and wants to retain them.
I want Barack ObamaCare to win, or more accurately, I want Mitt RomneyCare to lose so that the Tea Party have a better chance of completely and utterly destroying the Republican establishment that decided to run a jackanapes like Romney. The objective I would like to see is that the Republican party either collapses completely to make room for something else or actually reinvents itself to make it worth voting for (also fine by me).
Romney is what happens when the Stupid Party (USA Branch) realise they only have to be ever so slightly less evil than the Evil Party (USA Branch) in order to get your vote.
British politics is very boring compared to American politics just now, a fact reflected in the content of recent Samizdata postings. What is there to say about Britain now? They almost all agree, or pretend to agree. They are almost all mistaken. That about covers it. At least in the USA there is occasional debate about something resembling principles.
Perhaps principles are easier to observe from a distance, uncluttered by nearby clutter, rather as skyscrapers loom larger when viewed from a distance. But from where I sit, in Britain, part of the reason for this British political boringness is that Prime Minister Cameron has no apparent objective other than to remain Prime Minister Cameron. What he does at any given moment seems to be entirely the consequence of the various directions in which, and the varying force with which, he is being pulled, pushed, kicked, bribed or threatened. He himself never makes a decision, other than a decision about the combined effect upon him of these various forces.
I seem to recall reading, not long after the coalition government was formed, that Cameron may actually prefer coalition government to regular government. That way, interpreting and constantly rebalancing all those forces is his basic job.
But when those forces change, what Cameron does changes with them, and that can be slightly interesting. One such slightly interesting shift happened in the course of the recent cabinet reshuffle, in the form of the appointment of someone called Owen Paterson to be the government’s Environment Secretary. The interesting thing being that apparently Owen Paterson is not nearly as devoted to wind power as the Windies (so to speak) think that such a person ought to be. In general, Paterson lacks green enthusiasm, as Fraser Nelson explains.
Owen Paterson is far from a household name, but the significance of his appointment as Environment Secretary has not been lost on the green lobby groups. As far as they’re concerned, this is war. They are already denouncing him as a “prominent hater of wind turbines” and overall climate change sceptic.
Sounds like good news to me (rather as the news in this posting was), except actually what “climate change sceptics” are really sceptical about is not climate change but climate catastrophe.
So, why the change of public mood, and consequent slight Cameron shift? Well, part of it is that climate catastrophe scepticism is growing and growing. As I keep insisting, the key to all this is catastrophe. If the climate is just changing a bit, and if sea levels are about to rise a bit, then the obvious answer is for us to adapt, and let the market send us whatever signals it is inclined to. Only if climate catastrophe looms does it make any sense to shut down regular economics and switch the entire world over to emergency tyranny mode, of the sort that the people who set the climate catastrophe scam up in the first place yearn for. But more and more people now believe that there is no more reason now than at any other time in human history to expect climate catastrophe. In short, our side is (as it has been for several years now) winning the climate catastrophe argument (which is the bit of the argument that matters), big time.
The wider public, the sort of public (most of it) that is far more bothered about its fuel bills than by any arguments about longer term climate upheavals, is getting the news of this intellectual transformation not just in the form of an abatement of green propaganda, but also in more elusive ways, involving moral atmospherics.
Fraser Nelson again:
For more than a decade, environmental policy has been cursed with cross-party consensus because no one wanted to be seen to oppose so noble a cause.
It is precisely this air of green nobility that is now changing, as Cameron has surely noticed.
Thanks at first to the whistle blowing sceptics like Steve McIntyre, and then to the bloggers and journos who publicised such findings as McIntyre’s, like Andrew Montford, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole, and now to the big-time daily newspapers who have been joining in more recently with similar stories, “climate science” just doesn’t seem as noble as it used to. Frankly it is being presented as downright corrupt. These “scientists” don’t insist upon the truth of their opinions merely because they just do. They do this because this is how they now make their living. Their constant screeching about the venal motives of their opponents is pure projection, and is more and more being presented to the wider public as just that.
Meanwhile, on the back of the climate science scam, a new variety of green entrepreneur (one of them being David Cameron’s own father-in-law) has arisen. In the days of unchallenged green nobility, the people who thought along these lines both set up or participated in green businesses and sat on public bodies whose mission was to impose the very green schemes and regulations that these green businesses depended on for their profitability. Time was when this seemed okay. But not now. Suddenly, being the director of a wind farm company, and at the same time sitting on some government committee which does all it can to block other and more rational forms of energy doesn’t look quite as noble as once it did.
It’s not that the Windies have given up exerting any forces of their own. The point is that these people are now on the defensive. From the green point of view, the times they are a-changing, and when the times change, people like David Cameron change with them.
According to Der Spiegel, the company that makes the AK-47 has gone bankrupt. This is not because of the imminent fulfilment of the words of Isaiah 2:4 but because the Russian army stopped buying Kalashnikovs, and because of competition from cheap Chinese knockoffs. They dare not tell Mikhail Timofeyevich himself; at 92 the shock would kill him.
I draw no moral. I just shake my head at the sheer difference between the world as it is and the world as it used to be. If you had shown me the headline “the company that makes the AK-47 has gone bankrupt” in 1988, I would have assumed it was an unusually amusing randomly generated phrase.
What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they’re not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That’s not a stand, it’s a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
– Peggy Noonan.
My own prediction: Obama’s finished.
I wish more people had the commonsense of this man:
“I bought and sold FB shares as a TRADE, not an investment. I lost money. When the stock didn’t bounce as I thought/hoped it would, I realized I was wrong and got out. It wasn’t the fault of the FB CFO that I lost money. It was my fault. I know that no one sells me shares of stock because they expect the price of the stock to go up. So someone saw me coming and they sold me the stock. That is the way the stock market works. When you sit at the trading terminal you look for the sucker. When you don’t see one, it’s you. In this case it was me.”
This are remarks, reported by Bloomberg, of a man called Mark Cuban, who owns a US basketball team. He could have pointed the finger at the various Facebook honchos, or blamed the fiasco of the Facebook IPO on the Nasdaq, or some eeeevil Wall Street bankers, or some-such, but he didn’t. He knew that buying shares in a newly listed firm is risky; it is particularly risky in such a relatively novel field as social media where the revenue model is not always very clear to discern.
The FB share debacle is a million miles away from the sort of loss that happened because of, say, a Ponzi fraudster such as Madoff, or the like. FB put itself up in the public market; a lot of people said how splendid this was going to be, and some rich people got richer, some lost a lot of money, and others have broken even. That’s how it is.
Background:
Andy and Tracey Ferrie were questioned by police for more than two days following the incident in Welby, near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, early on Sunday. The couple, the victims of three previous break-ins, were confronted in their bedroom by several men who had smashed their way into their home.
Using a legally held shotgun, one pulled the trigger on the intruders, leaving two with minor wounds.
Yesterday it was announced the Crown Prosecution Service would not bring charges.
Response: The Guardian gets a cop to write an article called How to defend your home against burglars – the safe way. It says,
So what’s the right course of action when you come across a thief in your own home? It’s a question I don’t want to have to answer, so I’ve done all I can to prevent a burglar targeting our home in the first place. Follows these steps, and the chances are you will never have to deal with that question either.
The steps he suggests are not bad advice – I assume he thought, wrongly, that it was too obvious to need saying that you can always replace the letterbox in the door with a US style outside mailbox – but, um, what is the right course of action when you come across a thief in your own home?
It was extraordinary to see the convention chairman, Mayor Villaraigosa, try to ram through those platform changes yesterday. And succeed in doing so. But dishonestly. Bewildered, he kept having the delegates vote again.
I was reminded of the European Union. Years ago, some countries were given the opportunity to vote on EU membership. When the people said no, the EU made them vote again, until they got it “right.” Remember?
Repeatedly, about half the convention voted for the platform changes, and about half voted against. Then Villaraigosa declared — willy-nilly — that the yes votes were two-thirds of the convention!
That’s what the people were booing about, I think. Maybe they were booing God and Jerusalem tangentially. It suits Republican politics to say they were booing God and Jerusalem (a lovely combination, by the way!) — and heaven knows I want the Republicans to win more than anyone else in the country can possibly do. But I think the delegates were mainly booing the rank dishonesty of the process.
–Jay Nordlinger
The Danish and Irish repeated referenda were about the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties respectively, not EU membership. But the analogy holds – only I don’t think that the EU has fiddled the count as yet.
What Frank J. Fleming says here, to the effect that America has let President Obama down, is, I think, both very funny and nail-on-the-head accurate in describing the sort of man President Obama does indeed seem to be.
The other night I had dinner with a friend and I heard myself saying a couple of things about what might soon be happening in the US presidential election campaign.
First, I speculated that, any week or month now, the mainstream USA media might turn against Obama. All it will take is them deciding that he is going to lose and that nothing they can say will change that, and at that point they’ll stop publicly worshipping him and start reporting on what he says and does and on what people are making of it, almost like he was some kind of Republican or something. Their purpose will not be honesty. Their purpose will be to make the dishonesties they later unleash, upon President Romney in particular and upon the world in general, seem slightly more believable.
And when I got home, I found that something like this was already starting to happen.
Oh, they haven’t all given up on their guy yet, by no means. But they are surely starting to fret quite seriously that just shovelling out nothing but propaganda for him is making them look ever so slightly silly.
And the other thing I said was that if Obama himself decides that he is going to lose, no matter what he says (not least because of all the damn media people selling him out like so many rats running down a ship’s gangplank), he might, at some point between now and election day, say to hell with this, and give America a piece of his mind, rather than just smiling and taking it all on the chin.
He might say things like this, now only the mocking words of Frank J, only for real (here‘s the link to the second page of Frank J’s piece where this is to be found):
These past four years have just proven there is no reasoning with you hillbillies. Obama has given speech after speech after speech explaining things to you, but you never get it. Obama is a fragile flower you oafs keep trampling beneath your feet. You just babble things at him like, “You cain’t make peepul buy health inshuranse! It’s unconstitooshunal!” And then you whine about the national debt, when it’s none of your concern anyway – that’s the government’s business. What is it with you people questioning and ruining everything Obama is trying to do?
For “Obama” read “I”. Also, that “fragile flower” bit would have be changed to something more self-admiring. But otherwise, just like that.
As for my two guesses, the media turning against Obama, and Obama turning against the voters, well, I do admit that the first is a whole lot more likely than the second.
And both are matters of degree rather than absolutes. Some members of the mainstream USA media may change their grovellingly pro-Obama tune a bit, even as others carry right on singing the same old songs like it was 2008. And Obama will probably let his annoyance with the damn voters show a bit, just now and again, but then he’ll rein himself in. There is, after all, a whole big global ruling class out there, and Obama is going to carry on functioning within it just fine and very lucratively, provided he behaves himself reasonably well in the meantime. So a total Obama melt-down is probably too much to hope for. But I would love to hear him say at least some things along Frank J’s lines.
As might quite a few of Obama’s long-suffering supporters, who have surely been saying exactly these kinds of things amongst themselves, and to friendly reporters whose discretion the Obama campaign has, so far, been able to rely on.
(I have updated the item with comments below after the Post-Libertarianism blog responded).
I suppose it is inevitable that people who are unconvinced by a supposedly strong “consensus” in favour of CAGW are going to be branded as conspiracy theorists, putting them into the same category as 9/11 Truthers, Holocaust revisionists, and sundry other people of varying levels of delusion, looniness or nastiness. (There is even a person – anonymous and writing for the “Post-Libertarianism” blog, claiming to be a bit of a supporter of libertarianism who says he is appalled at how so many libertarians are skeptics. This blogger seems to write in a permanent state of rage.)
At the Adam Smith Institute blog, Chris Snowdon makes this point about the value, or otherwise, of surveys of opinions about such matters:
“That being said, it would come as no great surprise if free marketeers were more likely to be sceptical of climate change than left-wingers since many of the most prominent global warming advocates are on the left and many of the proposed solutions involve encroachments on economic or social liberties. There is, therefore, a greater motivation for them to seek out alternative hypotheses. Conversely, one might conclude that socialists are more likely to embrace the issue than right-wingers, and for the same reason, but since the study did not use a control group, we have no way of knowing if free marketeers are over-represented in the sceptic camp or if the numbers are what you would expect from a random sample of the population.”
“The (considerably weaker) relationship between climate change scepticism and conspiratorial thinking is more interesting and it made me wonder whether the study also found a link between free market beliefs and conspiracy theories. The researchers do not say—although they must have the data—and I would be surprised if such a link exists. One striking aspect of David Aaronovich’s excellent book Voodoo Histories is how many conspiracy theories are of the left. The two biggest conspiracy theories of the last century—the JFK assassination and the 9/11 ‘inside job’—surely do not correlate with free market beliefs. More likely, they correlate with the politics of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, both of whom have managed to keep their careers on track despite publicly promoting some quite outrageous drivel.”
“I dare say that free market views would also not correlate with the belief that the invasion of Iraq was a ‘war for oil’ with Halliburton pulling the strings, or that Hilda Murrell, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and David Kelly were murdered by the government, or that the 2000 US presidential election was rigged, or that the government blew up New Orleans’ levees during Hurricane Katrina, or, for that matter, that anyone who is sceptical about climate change is funded by the fossil fuel industry.”
On the subject of why people believe in conspiracies, Michael Shermer is usually very good on the subject. His demolition of Holocaust deniers is brilliant as an example of historiography and painstaking analysis.
Update: The blogger at Post-Libertarianism responded. He/she seems rather bemused by Samizdata and where we are coming from. I should have thought that the “who are we” segment on the top right hand corner of the homepage should provide a decent outline. Samizdata isn’t a sort of “hardcore” libertarian blog, by the way – there have, for example, been distinct differences of view by commentators about matters such as the 2003 Coalition overthrow of Saddam. Anyway, the blogger has elaborated on where he/she stands on the approach to CAGW. He/she argues that the word “skeptic” is inappropriate to describe people who, allegedly, are in total denial about whether any Man-made global warming of a potentially damaging nature is occurring. Fair enough. Personally, I think people who don’t sign up to the full CAGW point of view come in different flavours: some – like me, are skeptics because of how issues such as the “hockey stick” prediction have not only failed to materialise, but because some of the most prominent scientists involved seem to have a cavalier approach to evidence and criticism, as evidence by the University of East Anglia leaked emails issue, and other behaviours as recently chronicled by James Delingpole.
There is also no doubt, as Post-Libertarianism can see, that while it is perfect possible for a person to be concerned about CAGW and be a libertarian, favouring non-state measures to adapt to CAGW or prevent it, there is no doubt that in general, most people who are pressing the CAGW case are statists of various types, and are arguing for taxes, regulations and other coercive state measures to deal with it. There is, in other words, a natural inclination on the part of libertarians to treat CAGW as a version of a moral panic of the sort that have been used in the past to justify intrusive government actions down the centuries. The same applies to views about race, for example. While it is possible that some people who are interested in race and IQ might have benign intentions and wish to push the boundaries of knowledge and protect freedom, in my experience – and that of many others – most people who discuss such matters are often racial collectivists who are happy to use the power of the state to bring about outcomes they consider desirable.
One final point. Post-Libertarianism objects to my description of him as “a bit of a supporter of libertarianism”. Well, the writer says in this post: “My idea of post-libertarianism is that of a sane, philosophical, scholarly anarcho-capitalist libertarianism that has disengaged itself from the maniacs, sociopaths, and garden-variety crackpots of LRC, LvMI, ARI, LP, FEE, and other errorist organizations (except for ARI, which is a full-fledged terrorist organization).”
Well, leave aside whether all of the organisations mentioned deserve to be so described. The fact is that this person does, by his/her own words, appear to be a libertarian of sorts. I’d be interested to know who the author of that blog actually is. If you are going to throw rocks from the position of anonymity, it looks a bit slimy unless there are good, work-based or other professional reasons for doing so.
Another Update: Post-Libertarianism – I am now convinced the author is a he (you can just tell somehow) – is a regular charmer:
“As for your whining about my anonymity: if there is a need for you to know who I am, then please describe and explain that need. I don’t give a damn who you are; why should you give a damn who I am?”
Let me spell it out for him: unless there is a clear need for work reasons (some firms make it almost impossible for people to blog under their real names) it is surely best to say who you are, or, if you have a pen-name, develop it over a period of time so that one has a sort of track record (this is what I have done.) For a start, it encourages a basic level of civility. Also, if you are in the business of making harsh attacks on people about their academic qualifications (as PL does about some of the people involved at, say, George Mason University), or otherwise attacking the intelligence, objectivity or bias of people such as the late Thomas Szasz – as PL does – then it perhaps aids the credibility of such attacks if the attacker can explain who he or she is, what their own academic and professional qualifications are, and so on. This is not “whining”; rather, it is a call for a basic amount of civility and accountability. Of course, this person is free to continue blogging away anonymously. But I happen to think that this will hamper his efforts to clean up libertarianism effectively.
Anyway, enough of this. I actually like – mostly – what this person is trying to do.
“Nowadays I seldom go to the cinema, and this isn’t only because there are few where I live. It’s because, judging from reviews, there is very little I want to see. It’s also partly because I have the impression that directors now despise dialogue, or resent the need for it, and so often have it muttered just out of earshot, or smothered by music. But the real reason goes deeper, and is also why cinema is in terminal artistic decline.”
– Allan Massie.
Is he right? I would be interested if commenters could give examples of where they think there are still films getting made that are packed with dialogue. As Brian Micklethwait wrote earlier this year about the film, Margin Call, there are still films getting made that are designed for intelligent people who don’t require lots of car chases to hold their interest. (Not that there is anything wrong with a car chase or a straightforward race, such as when Steve McQueen is involved.)
To make a more philosophical point, assuming that Massie is correct – and I think he probably is – does the decline in dialogue mainly reflect the changing demographics of film audiiences? It might do so. The sort of more intelligent material that holds lots of dialogue, credible plots and so on is now increasingly getting made for television, especially in the US. Think of shows (I am not saying they are all good, by the way) such as Mad Men, The West Wing, CSI, 24, Grey’s Anatomy, The Sopranos, etc. And of course another factor is how, as humans, we tend to remember the good stuff and forget, or try to forget, the old 80-20 rule: 80 per cent or so of most stuff that ever gets made is utter crap. Even most Elizabethan plays were probably not all that good. But we remember Shakespeare.
“I don’t think there are any Liberal Democrats who have anything other than admiration for Ken and the way he works.”
– an ‘aide to Mr. Clegg‘. Can you think of anything more damning?
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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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