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.
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“In order to punish Barclays further, they should have to start life again as a third division Scottish football club.”
Mark Littlewood, boss of the Institute of Economic Affairs, in a private communication via Facebook. It is so good that I don’t think he’ll mind me quoting him here.
He is talking about the resignation, announced today, of Bob Diamond as CEO of Barclays. That bank has been fined a total of £290 million by US and UK authorities for manipulating the inter-bank interest rates known as LIBOR. Criminal prosecutions are high possible and the net could widen very far indeed.
Barclays is one of those UK banks – HSBC being the other big high street one – that did not receive, nor ask for, bailouts by the UK taxpayer. However, that bank, like all the rest, did benefit from the privilege of being able to get access to cheap Bank of England funding; and it also benefited from state-backed guarantees. The point cannot be made too often: we don’t have a proper capitalist banking system but at best a hybrid. But it also needs to be recognised that even in a world of total laissez faire and no funny fiat money, there might still be market conventions for setting a benchmark reference rate for interest rates between banks, just as there is a daily “fix” for the gold price in the London spot gold market. Such market benchmarks arise, like a sort of Hayekian spontaneous order, because they are useful for other economic actors in pricing products of their own.
However, when a bank or other institution fiddles the prices submitted for these benchmarks, it erodes confidence in the system and the reputation of the miscreant will be badly damaged. In a crude sort of way, what has happened is a good sign that organisations which screw up suffer.
Update: Guido Fawkes weighs in, and points out that the manipulation of interest rates has also been government policy for years.
 London, England. (Photographed from a rooftop in Peckham) . 
Chernobyl, Ukraine. (Photographed from a rooftop in Pripyat).
North Wales Police have issued a (probably illegal) “dispersal order” banning unaccompanied teenagers from Bangor in the evenings. They say it is not a blanket ban. The words of the order say it is.
Ellie May O’Hagan opposes it because it makes teenagers feel bad, and because it would have made her feel bad when she was a teenager:
For the 13-year-old me, a curfew would have meant more isolation, more casting adrift, a stronger sense that the town in which I lived didn’t really care about my place in it. I might have felt frustrated that a lack of youth services forced me on to the street, and then that my presence there automatically made me deviant. Then I might have decided not to care about a city that didn’t care about me.
Keith Towler, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales opposes it because it makes people have bad feelings towards teenagers:
“It demonises under 16s, isolates them from their communities, alienates them from police and spreads the misconception all young people are troublemakers.”
There is talk of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission opposing it because it is discrimination. At least they won’t have far to toddle. The EHRC has an office in Bangor.
I am glad all these worthies and unworthies oppose the curfew. It needs opposing. But it saddens me that nobody opposes it on the grounds of how dare they. How dare they stop people who have committed no crime from walking or standing in the public street? In the case of a shopping centre or a nightclub I vehemently support the right of the proprietors to exclude whomsoever they wish. I also support, if more cautiously, the right of small areas to set local rules and covenants as to whether alcohol is permitted, rules about noise and similar constraints. But North Wales Police have exactly as much a right to expel teenagers from a public space as North Wales teenagers have a right to expel the police.
There is a new law in France that every car must carry a breathalyser so that drivers can test themselves and see if they are fit to drive.
Call me a cynic if you like but I strongly suspect that certain law makers may well have significant pecuniary interests in…
… the country’s two companies that make these breathalyser sets 
Bob Neill MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Communities and Local Government, has written to all local authority leaders.
Yes, I know, be still my beating heart, a post about local government. I will try to keep it brief and malicious, like Bob Neill’s letter.
Remember how John Prescott’s Standards Board for England curbed freedom of speech for local councillors under the guise of “standards”?
Remember how its supposedly reformed local sucessors demanded that councillors “show respect and consideration for others”? This meant, for example, that John Dixon, a Cardiff councillor visiting London who tweeted while passing the Scientologist church in Tottenham Court Road that he just hurried past “in case the stupid rubs off” was reported to the local Standards Board. He was cleared, but as so often, and as the Scientologist who reported him knew very well, the process is the punishment.
Well, the local Standards Boards have in their turn been abolished and new rules come in tomorrow. I have not studied them in detail and am slightly less likely to do so than to gnaw off my own legs. They will probably go bad in their turn. The new rules, not my legs. But just for today, I find myself happy about this part of Bob Neill’s letter:
However, given the importance that the new arrangements are, and are clearly perceived to be, a wholly fresh start we are minded to make further provision so that any former member of a standards committee appointed under the transitional arrangements as an independent person can hold that office only until 30 June 2013.
So we bid farewell today to some quangocrats. And just for once the revolving door that smoothly glides in front of such people as it leads them from one sinecure to the next has stuck.
It’s not capitalism when private individuals stand to gain from their actions but the taxpayer carries the risk. When risks are socialised and potential profits huge, individuals are bound to be reckless: why be responsible? It’s no good agonising about the culture of banking without considering the astronomical moral hazard endemic in the system today. Of course people who do not have to bear the negative consequences of their actions behave badly.
– Steve Baker MP
There is a lot of conflicting opinion being fired at the US Supreme Court’s ruling(PDF) on “Obamacare”. It is certainly a curious ruling both on first and subsequent reads. I think the opinions in the decision make a great deal of, perhaps complete, sense when viewed in the terms of ‘doing a Marbury v Madison‘. That was a decision written by Chief Justice Marshall in 1803. From that decision, Marshall is regarded as the founder of the Supreme Court and the Judicial branch as it came to be understood and accepted in the balance of powers.
In this article, I am not addressing the merits of the Affordable Care Act, I am speaking to the Constitutional elements at work in the decision.
Roberts declares his view of judicial legislating in one succinct sentence. “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” Notice he said “political” choices. If something can be allowable under the Constitution, then a restrained Court goes out of its way to accommodate it to the Constitution. If something is Constitutionally permissible, then whether or not to do it is entirely within the sphere of politics, not Constitutional law. We will never find perfect masters and expecting the Supreme Court to attempt that role is contrary to limited government. Roberts appears to be channeling Mencken with this declaration. → Continue reading: A good day for limited government
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.
– P. J. O’Rourke
It may be a minor thing but why oh why do people who cover the world’s conflicts seem to have so little technical knowledge of the subject they cover? I saw an article in the Telegraph with an image captioned “This image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Homs, Syria”… except it is clearly not a “tank”, it is a BMP… an infantry fighting vehicle.
This is not new. I spent much of the 1990’s in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and was often exasperated to grab a western newspaper in Zagreb and see pictures of “Croatian tanks”… which more often than not captured former Yugoslav OT M-60 APCs pressed into service by the Croatian, HVO or BiH armies… or even rather exotic Croatian improvised armoured personnel carriers (in effect armoured trucks with a machine gun). More recently I also recall a clip on CNN describing “British tanks” in Iraq that were in fact AS-90 artillery vehicles.
It seems odd to me that so few modern war correspondents are ex-military and thus, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, far too many of them cannot tell the difference between a Mauser and a javelin (and neither can their editors it seems). This is certainly why I find Michael Yon so refreshing… he actually understands what he is looking at up the sharp end.
To hire an opinion pollster as a strategist is to put a spinning weathervane where a compass needle ought to be
– Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
Now where did I see the leader of this dismal crew described as a weathervane before back in 2007?
No, I don’t mean the US Supreme Court. The lads were doing their best. If they got a bit obsessed on the question of whether Obamacare was constitutional rather than whether it was a bad idea, you can’t really blame them. Obsessing on constitutionality is what they are paid for.
The court that is pre-eminent among the “many, many things in this so-termed civilization of ours which would be mightily improved by a once over lightly of the Hiroshima treatment”, as Robert Heinlein once put it, is Doncaster Crown Court, particularly when presided over by Judge Jacqueline Davies. It was she (styled ‘Her honour Judge Jacqueline Davies'”) who in November 2010 found against Paul Chambers in his appeal against conviction for “menace” for jokingly saying on Twitter that he was going to blow up an airport if it did not reopen quickly enough after being closed by snow. He did not say this to anyone at the airport, I remind you, he said it to the internet friend he was flying to meet. Then some security loser decided to reenact the story about the old woman who rings up the police to say her neighbour is standing naked at his window. If you recall, the cop asks sympathetically whether she is very shaken up. “Dreadfullly,” she says, “I was so shocked when I saw it, I nearly fell right off the stepladder.” Only this time the police thought the joke would end better with an arrest.
Supported by, among many others, the comedians Stephen Fry and Al Murray – good for them – Paul Chambers has appealed again and a High Court hearing was held yesterday. Judgement has been reserved for a later date. Now it is our turn on this side of the pond to get tense about a judicial decision affecting liberty.
Just warning you guys….
You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m going to be sure. From orbit.
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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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