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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One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It’s like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. To make a game of it. Or something.
So, for instance, if Evil concedes that, I don’t know, “socialism hasn’t turned out very well in practice”, Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea “in theory”.
No it wasn’t. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea.
Often, in circumstances like these, Evil even asks for an equalising goal.
Evil offers a pairing of ideas – good twinned with evil, like socks emerging from the laundrette – as a package: “I’ll concede that socialism has turned out badly in practice if you concede that socialism is a nice theory.”
The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead.
The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: “Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let’s talk about that. And let’s you admit that you are wrong about that also. We told you you were wrong from the start, and we were right that you were wrong. We predicted that socialism would turn out badly in practice, on account of it being a bad theory. You pressed on. You were wrong. In theory as well as in practice.”
Like I say, press for two-nil.
So, all hail to Mark Meckler. (And further hail to Instapundit for linking to the story, today, and earlier.)
Meckler, arriving in New York and learning that he must not carry a gun, handed his gun over to the New York goons. (That much, he was willing to concede.) The goons promptly arrested him, for carrying the gun up to the point where he stopped carrying it, or something.
Faced with a determined Meckler, and a huge outcry of rage and contempt from the forces of Good, the New York goons have dropped their evil charges. One-nil to Meckler. But Meckler is now being subjected to another evil injustice. The goons still have his gun, and are refusing to return it.
Instead of thanking the goons for being so nice about not arresting him any more, Meckler now wants his gun back. Quite right. New York goons, give the man his gun back! (This is now an international campaign. I am international and I now say this.)
Saying “now give me back my gun” is not only the good thing for Good Mr Meckler to do; it is also excellent tactics. He is now one-nil up. He faces the chance to score another goal, and go two-nil up against the forces of Evil. He is now pressing to do just that.
Quite right. When you have argumentative momentum, against a team that is saying (or in this case also doing) not just one bad thing but many bad things, use it. Thereby keep it, and build it.
When the New York goons do hand back Meckler’s gun, if they ever do (and actually, even if they don’t), the proper next response, from all of us who have now rallied around Meckler, is: “Now, about all these other gun-carrying people, against whom you have not dropped the charges, and whose guns you have not returned …” Three-nil. Four-nil. Five-nil …
If the New York goons don’t hand back Meckler’s gun, perhaps because they sense that if they do, Meckler’s team will then get more momentum, then the New York goons will be digging their heels in in an argument that they will hate but which the Meckler team will relish.
Also good. Shame about the stolen gun, but also good.
If we immerse ourselves wholly in day-to-day affairs, we cease making fundamental distinctions, or asking the really basic questions. Soon, basic issues are forgotten, and aimless drift is substituted for firm adherence to principle. Often we need to gain perspective, to stand aside from our everyday affairs in order to understand them more fully. This is particularly true in our economy, where interrelations are so intricate that we must isolate a few important factors, analyze them, and then trace their operations in the complex world.
– from the Introduction of What Has Government Done To Our Money? by Murray Rothbard. To read the whole thing, go here.
Whilst I am working a private contractor cyber-defence job for a large financial conference, it seems apropos to summarise some recent intel from Janes.
The DOD is selling two THAAD missile interceptor batteries to the United Arab Emirates, This is the first international sale. I wonder who they are defending against..
US chooses Super Tucano for Afghan Air Force
Sierra Nevada and Embraer have been selected to deliver A-29 Super Tucano’s the Afghan Air Force (AAF) and 15 more for the USAF. This is also interesting because Sierra Nevada is developing the DreamChaser orbital space plane.
The Saudi’s are buying 84 new F-15SA Eagle’s with Raytheon’s APG-63(V)3 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, a digital electronic warfare system (DEWS) and a Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS). I wonder who they are defending against…
General Atomics has the contract for Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) configurations for the UK’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier programme. Mass Drivers as we call them in the space business, are a key technology for lunar industry.
The US Missile Defense Agency has selected Boeing to oversee the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system in a multibillion dollar sustainment effort. This system will defend the US against a rogue state attacks. At the same time a bunch of orders were placed at the end of 2011 as noted here and above. Raytheon’s SM-3 was also in the mix. On the downside, the Boeing 747-400F carrying the YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) is being mothballed as the development has been terminated.
The Indian Navy has gone nuclear with the Akula-class (Project 971) nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) now in its hands on a 10 year lease from the Russians. The 9,246 tonne (dived) INS Chakra (ex- Nerpa ) recently finished sea trials three years behind schedule.
If you are depressed about the economic state of the world, one way to cheer yourself up is to google things like “fracking” or “natural gas”. Another is to try “3D printing”. That was how I found my way to this piece, about a company which has started selling 3D printers to … people. From what I can make out, each printer now costs something like two thousand dollars, more or less, depending on whether you want it ready to roll or are willing to assemble it yourself.
I can think of three things, right away, that are bound to be true about such “printers”. They will get cleverer. They will get cheaper. They will get smaller.
Currently, these gizmos seem to resemble those very early personal computers, circa 1975 (as I remember it). There are no very obvious things you can do with them, but despite that, they just reek of the future. Learn about them, and the next four decades of world technological history will be yours to surf at will, in ways that are impossible to know the details of but which are bound to be huge.
In due course, 3D printers may become no rarer than the 2D printers like the one I have on my desk are now. The first laser printer I blagged may way to using cost (someone else) around two thousand quid. My current one cost (me) about eighty quid, and is much better, not least because it is so much smaller. Presumably similar progress will occur with 3D printers.
I wonder what such machines will do to the world?
I listen a lot to Radio 3, the classical music channel, especially first thing in the morning. This inevitably involves listening to BBC news bulletins, which can be quite an ordeal. This morning, as my brain surfaced into consciousness, I heard a strange item, about how the government intends to switch the subsidies it gives to the British movie industry towards more popular movies, presumably away from whatever unpopular movies government subsidies had hitherto been encouraging.
Two questions immediately present themselves.
First, how does the government expect to be able to foretell which films will be popular, before they are made? Many very highly paid, very clever people routinely fail in this task, despite such people entirely concentrating (in extreme contrast to people run governments) on trying to be right about such things. What makes our government suppose that it can do any better than such persons?
And second, are not “popular” movies the exact sort of movies as would be encouraged in a totally free market? So what is the point of such subsidies? Would it not be more sensible simply to get rid of them altogether?
This seems to be the story that my half-awake mind latched onto this morning. For once, I agree with Ken Loach, who appears briefly in the video report. This is indeed typical Tory crassness. Many “mainstream” movies, or at any rate movies intended to be maintream, fail. But, and here I presumably do not agree with Ken Loach, all other government movie subsidies are also crass.
There is nothing in this film for the Left. Where they demonized Margaret Thatcher, the movie humanizes her. It is not about the great events of her political life; these are its backdrop. Her entry into Parliament, her leadership bid, the miners’ strike, the IRA and the Falklands War all feature, but the movie is not about them. Rather is it about the strength of character with which she confronted successive challenges and crises.
– Madsen Pirie reviews The Iron Lady. Unlike Nicholas Wapshott, Pirie liked it a lot, and says it will make those who see it like and admire the lady herself more.
I am going to be in Israel from the 20th to the 28th of January. The plan is to be in Tel Aviv for two or three days from the 20th, then hopefully Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth, perhaps a little wine tourism in the Golan Heights, and Beersheba if I have time, which I may not. This will be my first trip and as always, there can be more visits. One of the purposes of a first trip to anywhere is to find out about the interesting things to do and see on subsequent visits.
The aim, as is the case with most of my travel, is to go, look round, and try to get some sense of the place. In Israel, the cultural and architectural magnificence of the place makes this particularly daunting. I am coming with the sense that Israel is one of the most egregiously missing places from my travels, but also with a certain amount of cultural baggage. I attended Anglican Sunday school as a child, of course, but was taught my biblical history in the sense that it felt that these were mythical places. That they were actually real took a more adult understanding.
Plus of course, there is the modern economy: every government in the world has seemingly released press releases stating how “We must create the Silicon Valley of (wherever)” (seemingly failing to understand that by government direction is not how you do it), but Israel seems to be virtually the only country in the world with a startup and tech economy scene that is actually worthy of such a description. My admiration for this is enormous, but my detailed knowledge of it is less than I would like it to be. If anyone wants to tell me more about this / show me how this has happened, I would be delighted to let them tell me and/or show me.
Several of my Jewish and Israeli friends have already offered me advice on what to see and do, of course, but further advice would be welcome, particularly from readers of this blog who may have some sense of my quirky sensibilities. Comments on this post are welcome, as is e-mail to michael.jennings at gmail.com. I promise to write about interesting things that I find on this blog.
It is surprisingly easy to get the sign wrong when reasoning about quantities. Consider this old riddle:
Three ladies go to a restaurant for a meal. They receive a bill for $30. They each put $10 on the table, which the waiter collects and takes to the till. The cashier informs the waiter that the bill should only have been for $25 and returns $5 to the waiter in $1 coins. On the way back to the table the waiter realizes that he cannot divide the coins equally between the ladies. As they didn’t know the total of the revised bill, he decides to put $2 in his own pocket and give each of the ladies $1.
Now that each lady has been given a dollar back, each of the ladies has paid $9. Three times 9 is 27. The waiter has $2 in his pocket. Two plus 27 is $29. The ladies originally handed over $30. Where is the missing dollar?
To get the missing $1 in the question we have done this arithmetic: 10 + 10 + 10 – 1 – 1 – 1 + 2 – 30 = -1
The correct arithmetic is: 10 + 10 + 10 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 2 – 25 = 0
Positive numbers represent payments from the ladies to the restaurant, and negative numbers represent money received by the restaurant. The result should obviously always come out to zero. That +2 should be a -2. Okay, there is a 30 where there should be a 25 as well, but only because the +2 yielded an intermediate result of 29 which is close enough to 30 to cause confusion.
This getting the sign wrong is the same mistake that means Tim Worstall has to point out that jobs are a cost. The new widget factory will create 1000 jobs, we are told. If it produces 1000 widgets per year, that means we get one widget per man-year of time. The man-year of time is a cost. If we could somehow arrange for the widget factory to create only 100 jobs for the same output, we would have just as many widgets and 900 man-years left to spend on some other useful thing. We would be richer.
This mistake crops up in trivial ways all the time. My friend recently gave up full-time work to look after the children for various financial and logistical reasons. Think how the economy is losing out, she mused. Not only am I not producing widgets, I am not paying the nursery workers or buying train tickets for my commute. Well it is true that the widgets my friend used to make are no longer made, but the nursery workers do not count: the same amount of childcare is being done as was being done before. It is not correct to add the childcare previously done by the nursery worker to the childcare now done by my friend. At worst there is now an unemployed nursery worker who will go and do something else instead, but that is just a market optimising everyone’s activities to match the level of demand. The train tickets were just part of the cost of getting the widgets made.
Ah, train tickets. We are going to get a new high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. The government is going to ‘invest’ £32.7bn in order to reap up to £46.9bn of ‘economic benefits’. I wonder how many of these benefits have the wrong sign. Counted among the benefits are “hundreds of jobs”, but these are already included in the cost figure.
Also counted are ticket sales. Which makes sense if the ‘investment’ was really an investment. But invest here really means to steal from the British public £32.7bn so that they can then pay, say, £40bn for train tickets in exchange for £40bn worth of train travel. I make that -32.7 – 40 + 40 = -32.7. Where is the missing £32.7bn?
Now and again, when the subject of environmental alarmism comes up, someone – such as the likes of me – might wonder when, or whether, a mainstream, high-profile politician in an important country will get up and stick it to the Green lobby. For perhaps obvious economic reasons, given its vast natural resources, Canada seems to be the country where this is starting to seriously happen. Consider this report (Reuters):
On the eve of public hearings into a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the Pacific Coast, the Canadian government lashed out on Monday at what it said were foreign-funded radical groups opposing the project. The comments by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver were another sign of the pressures mounting against Enbridge Inc’s proposed C$5.5 billion ($5.4 billion) Northern Gateway pipeline. Canada’s right-leaning Conservative government, which says the pipeline would help diversify energy exports away from the United States and more towards Asia, says activists are clogging up the regulatory process.
There’s more:
“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade,” Oliver said in a statement. “These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda … They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” Ottawa and the oil industry are particularly interested in Northern Gateway after Washington delayed a decision on approving TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil sands crude from Alberta to Texas.
Of course, it goes without saying that the UK government is a million miles from this sort of rhetoric, with the partial exception to how ministers sometimes try to push aside environmental concerns that are raised about various transport or other projects. In these cases, though, there are legitimate private property rights issues as stake (such as the use of compulsory purchase powers to make way for something like a high-speed rail link). And as for AGW alarmism in particular, there is yet no sign of a major political figure realising how many votes might be won in confronting this.
Unlike Dale Amon, one of this site’s editors, I am not much of a fan of Ron Paul, or at least, not a fan of some of the people who back and cheerlead for his campaign. I can respect, even admire, how he has been consistent in pointing to the folly of central bank financial manipulation, which is why his campaign against the Fed is something I admire. I can also appreciate how he has pushed some important libertarian ideas into the political culture. A lot of people whose views I respect say that he has done a tremendous amount of good. And they argue that yes, that whole business about the letters back in the late 80s and early 90s was poor and did not reflect well on his judgement – hardly a good thing in a potential POTUS – but hey, plenty of people make mistakes and Paul has disowned this stuff.
But one of the things about the Ron Paul campaign that has concerned me is his foreign policy stance. I am not complaining about his anti-interventionism. That’s entirely consistent with a libertarian point of view; it draws on the wisdom of realising that one intervention inevitably breeds another and and another and so on in endless, disastrous profusion. But where he seriously leaves me behind is when he starts to make excuses, or gives the impression of doing so, for lousy regimes and individuals. Case in point being a video arguing that there would be a parallel between how Americans might feel if foreign troops were based in say, Texas, and the situation regarding US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tim Sandefur, a long-time critic of Ron Paul (he has called RP a “conman” and not a libertarian), has a ferocious article about the video, and in particular, brings up the issue of the American Civil War to highlight what he thinks is wrong with the video’s underlying premises and arguments.
“The video starts out by inviting us to sympathize with the Islamofascists, who, we are told, are led to military “resistance” against a foreign occupier—that is, the United States. Imagine that, say, the Chinese or the Russians maintained a military base in Texas, and that thousands of armed troops from such a nation were patrolling American streets. Wouldn’t that be awful? So surely we can understand why al Quaeda in Mesopotamia plants roadside bombs to kill American soldiers, no?”
“One notices right away that this opening sentence demands that we ignore the differences between the American forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the forces of al Qaeda and its allies—or the relative characters of the nations or institutions on whose behalf they act. American troops, representing a democratic nation that liberated Iraq from the barbarism of Saddam Hussein and helped to institute the first-ever democratic governments there and in Afghanistan, are to be regarded as the moral equivalent of, say, the People’s Liberation Army patrolling the streets of Dallas. Of course, once one accepts this moral equivalence, one is prepared to accept anything.”
Then, several paras later, this is:
“The climax of this moral equivalency comes in the middle of the video, when we are explicitly invited to imagine ourselves joining with some Holy Army of Martyrdom to “defend our soil and our sovereignty” by fighting against this invading army—and to feel sorry for these freedom fighters who are (so sad) labeled by an unfeeling world as terrorists or insurgents. This absurdity mutates into a thinly veiled accusation that Americans are simply committing genocide. At this point, one loses any interest in watching further.”
“Soil and sovereignty” is a particularly interesting choice of phrase: note that even this video does not have the chutzpah to suggest that those who strap bombs to their chests or set IEDs by roadsides in the Middle East are doing so in defense of, say, justice, or individual rights. It is just a question of “soil and sovereignty.” Of course, “soil and sovereignty,” or “Blut und Boden,” has long been the favorite slogan of all fascists. What it really means is, “room to oppress with impunity.” It is the demand for the freedom to enslave. Failure to recognize this is what has so often led otherwise sensible and sensitive people to mistake despotic thuggery for wars of national liberation—often until it is too late, and the bell tolls for thee.”
A question, though, is that its defence of intervention into brutal regimes does beg the question of who gets to decide which regimes fail a test of decency and should therefore be dealt with? But it is a good article, and I recommend the whole of it. Here is the final paragraph:
“By ridiculing the notion of defending democracy and preserving the peace in the Middle East, by regarding the troops of a democratic coalition in a region pock-marked with totalitarian fascist states as equivalent to a communist military patrolling the towns of Texas, the video ignores the difference between justice and tyranny, between peace and desolation, between freedom and slavery. And one who chooses to blind himself to these differences has chosen to blind himself to everything of importance in the world.”
Exactly so. If one is serious about belief in expanding freedom, would one not, to take another example, want to do something about the guy down the street who is known to be torturing his wife and kids, even if his actions had no direct bearing on one’s own?
At the same time, this article, by constitutional scholar and classical liberal, Randy Barnett, is a thoughtful item about some of the possible contradictions and problems associated with issues of sovereignty, liberty, and war.
But the question remains: however powerful the sort of arguments that Sandefur presents – and they are very powerful – who gets to decide that it is okay to pull the trigger? That is what makes these debates so infernally difficult.
Author’s note: It seems that we have started Monday in full “let’s shoot at Cameron” mode today. Well, it is still the game shooting season.
The comments from UK prime minister David Cameron, saying it would be wrong to scrap the UK top income rate of 50 per cent on incomes of £150,000 a year or more (which when other changes are taken into account, means a marginal rate of more than 60 per cent), are typical of this regime. The government knows that the tax rate is well on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, but this, remember, is a regime that cares with almost pathological zeal about the image it projects. The key is to show that those evil, high-earning bastards (like the sort of people who start businesses and run them) take their “fair” share of the current pain being inflicted in the name of deficit reduction.
The Tories played a high price for an inept general election campaign that required them to ally with the Liberal Democrats, a party full of people whose hostility to entrepreneurship and wealth creation is even more severe than it among parts of the Labour Party. And this hostility to high earners comes particularly ill from politicians, such as Mr Cameron, who have enjoyed the benefits of a rich inheritance rather than having to get their hands dirty by creating a business from scratch. Very ill, indeed.
As I commented on previously, David Cameron wants shareholders to vote on directors’ pay packages. Another problem with this occurs to me.
Right now I can value a company on its past performance and what I think its future performance will be, and part of this evaluation comes from my opinion of the decision-making abilities of the people in charge. If I know who they are, and am confident that they will hire the right people into the right positions, I might value the company more highly.
If shareholders make decisions I have the problem that the performance of the company depends on who the shareholders are, and I do not know who the other shareholders are.
In the specific case where shareholders can vote on directors’ pay, if we assume that the highest pay attracts the best performing directors, then the best performing companies will end up being the ones with the least left-wing shareholders.
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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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