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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Since Detlev Schlichter is discussed frequently around here, I thought it might be interesting to write a summary of some of the arguments from his book, Paper Money Collapse. Of course I am summarising my understanding of the arguments, so caveats about my fallibility apply; errors and omissions are mine.
He begins with a description of money. It is the medium of exchange. It needs to be something people agree on. Ideally there will be a fixed supply which is infinitely divisible. Precious metals fit the bill. Schlichter distinguishes between exchange value and use value. It is possible to use gold for jewelery and electronic components, so it has use value. But as soon as it is used as the medium of exchange it is the exchange value that dominates. Money has value because it can be exchanged for goods and services.
When people say they want more money, what they usually mean is that they want more goods and services. Nevertheless there is a demand for money as a store of readiness to exchange, in preparation for near-future purchases or unexpected needs. Within the limits of his means, a person can hold exactly the money he wants at any time. If he wants more money, he stops buying stuff and perhaps starts selling it. If he wants less money, he buys goods and services.
If demand for money falls, then more people want to buy goods and services, so prices go up and the purchasing power of a unit of money goes down. This continues until the reduced purchasing power of money causes people to want more money. If the demand for money increases, then more people want to sell goods and services, so prices go down and the purchasing power of a unit of money goes up. This continues until the demand for money is met. In this way, the purchasing power of money changes almost instantly, so the demand for money is met almost instantly. There is no need to create money to meet the demand for money.
Does this cause prices to be volatile? Perhaps, but Schlichter argues that it is impossible for a central authority to control the supply of money quickly enough to counter changes in demand for it. The only way they can measure these changes is by observing prices. By the time the price has changed so that it can be observed, it is too late. He also points to empirical evidence that suggests that prices are more volatile when central banks control the supply of money. → Continue reading: Summarising Schlichter
“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”
Unfortunately, not even the Gray Lady was able to extend the lifespan of this essayist and controversialist beyond his age of 62. Farewell, Hitch.
A few minutes back I was glancing through Chinese trade statistics, in an attempt to put together the hopefully reasonably detailed post on what is going on in China that Brian has been nagging me to write.
With respect to Europe, the stat that pops out is that Germany runs a significant trade surplus with China, but that the eurozone as a whole and even more the EU as a whole runs a large deficit. Trade patterns with China are responsible for part of the immense stresses that now exist on the €uro. The German surplus puts upward pressure on the currency at the same time that the southern deficits put strong downwards pressure on it.
One thing that comes up is the “Hong Kong Problem” in the statistics. Many containers of Chinese exports from the factories of Shenzhen and Dongguan are carried over the border into Hong Kong, and are then shipped from the port of Hong Kong. Others are carried to the port of Shenzhen and then exported from China directly. Which port is chosen determines whether the export shows up in China’s trade surplus with America or whether it shows up in Hong Kong’s trade surplus with America. It is not difficult to simply consolidate the numbers, but this is not always done, and figures are sometimes misleading because of this. The two ports of Hong Kong and Shenzhen are only a few miles away from each other, and are at present third and fourth in the list of busiest container ports in the world, but would be the busiest by far if counted together. I had seen the port of Hong Kong many times prior to my last visit to the area in 2008, but I was curious about the port of Shenzhen, so I visited the Yantian district of Shenzhen.
After I wandered down the roads between warehouses and goods yards full of containers for a time, and took many photographs through gates, a man in a uniform gestured to me to stop and went of to consult with someone else in a more impressive uniform. At this point I thought it would be good to make myself scarce, so I departed rapidly down the road and out of the container port. (I sent a text message to a private equity fund manager friend of mine in South Africa, who urged me to keep taking photographs, as he was interested in seeing them, and because “Mike, your safety is something I am entirely willing to risk”).
 But anyway, I made myself scarce. A half hour later I found myself walking along the shore past a rusting Russian aircraft carrier, which was apparently the centrepiece of a bankrupt, cold war themed theme park named “Minsk World”. After a while of this, I departed for a different area of Shenzhen, and somehow managed to end the day drinking a weissbier served to me by a young Chinese woman wearing a dirndl, while sitting on the deck of a boat that had once been Charles de Gaulle’s private yacht.
However, it was a good day. It is only on very special occasions that life gets this weird.
When buying two old Soviet aircraft carriers from the Ukrainians, the Chinese claimed that their reason for doing this was to convert them into tourist attractions. Reputedly, the actual situation was that they hoped to learn as much about aircraft carriers from them as possible, and then refit them as actual aircraft carriers. Upon discovering that they were in fact large and immense floating pieces of rust that had actually not been very good aircraft carriers in the first place, in a possible attempt to save face, the Chinese did attempt to convert them into tourist attractions after all. Thus the two Soviet military theme parks, one in Shenzhen based around the Minsk and the other in Tianjin based around the Kiev.
 
Both subsequently went bankrupt, a day out while looking at rusting remnants of the Soviet Union not apparently being a big attraction for the young Chinese. The Kiev carrier in Tianjin has apparently been subsequently converted into a hotel. The Minsk in Shenzhen continues to rust.). The Chinese in 1998 purchased the incomplete Admiral Kuznetsov class carrier the Varyag, which was at that point floating somewhere in the Ukrainian waters of the Black Sea. The carrier was officially bought by a Macau based tourist venture, with the pretext being that it would be converted into a casino. In this case, though, it remains in the hands of the Chinese military. After a (very) lengthy refit, it may one day enter into service in the Chinese navy.
All evidence is that the Chinese did in fact purchase Charles de Gaulle’s yacht with the intention of turning it into a floating Bavarian beer bar, however.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs continue to have rather snarky arguments with one another, even though Steve Jobs (Z”L) has been dead for some time now.
The pessimism expressed here for some time about China is now being expressed more widely.
Yesterday, via one of my favourite blogs, that of Mick Hartley (I especially like Hartley’s own photos), I found my way to some other photos by David Gray, of China and its newly minted ruins of the last decade and more. My favourite of these is the very first in the set displayed at the end of that link, which has what it takes to become “the” Chinese picture for right now.
It looks very impressive from a distance …
… but if you look at it closer up, it turns out to be a structure constructed by an idiot, full of steel and concrete, accomplishing nothing.
A few weeks ago, Samizdata’s travel and much else besides correspondent Michael Jennings, who has (of course) recently been in China (he has recently been everywhere), was talking of doing a piece about the mad building spree now, still, going on in China. I’d still love to read such a piece, but I fear that Michael may have missed that particular boat, in terms of revealing anything very shocking.
Happily, he did comment at length on an earlier short Samizdata posting about the Chinese construction bubble.
“Putting Meryl’s performance aside – I’ve raved about it enough, plus it was only a pie, and there was no custard – you do not get any sense of Thatcher’s political coming of age. Why did she believe what she believed, and why so vehemently? Why go to war, for example, over an island no one in Britain cared about? You also get no sense of the human cost of her policies, how she disadvantaged the poor and took a hammer to the society she did not believe in.”
Deborah Ross, writing a review of the film, The Iron Lady (about Margaret Thatcher), page 88, The Spectator (behind the paywall). Here is the Spectator link for those who pay for the thing.
It is quite amusing, in a grim sort of way, to see how a writer such as Ms Ross is torn by her admiration for the film as a piece of moviemaking art and its sympathetic portrayal of Lady Thatcher, and her own leftist opinions concerning the alleged impact of this person on the United Kingdom (her remarks about the Falklands presumably indicate Ms Ross would have let the Argentine junta just take the Falklands, but she never tells us in the short space available).
As a free market liberal, I certainly do not revere this politician (the government share of GDP at the end of her time in office was barely different from at the start and some thumpingly bad domestic legislation, like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, got passed), but it is nevertheless rather striking how certain film critics have had their heads messed by this film.
I am definitely going to see it. US-based movie reviewer Kyle Smith really liked it, and for the sort of reasons that, I suspect, upset Ms Ross.
Most readers will know about Detlev Schlichter and his book Paper Money Collapse. Some readers will know about Max Keiser who presents The Keiser Report on Russia Today. Yes, Russia Today. Doesn’t sound good does it?
Well, it is not all bad. Keiser does predict global economic collapse (the non-badness here being that his prediction is (I think) correct). He does blame central banks and their printing of money. He does point out that what we are seeing at the moment is very definitely not capitalism. He does interview a good number of libertarians such as Peter Schiff. And he does advocate the ownership of gold and silver.
But then things start to go downhill again. He forever blames the global situation on “banksters” and their “fraudulent” ways. While apparently being in favour of capitalism he still manages to lambast any attempt to control government spending. The UK coalition government’s austerity programme, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the Tea Party have all been criticised by him. He also seems to believe in global warming or to be more accurate: CAGWIT (that’s my new acronym: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Inspired Tyranny, by the way). And he interviews a whole bunch of nutters including Keynesians and anti-Israelis.
The other night he interviewed the distinctly non-nutty Detlev Schlichter. The good news is that Schlichter managed to get most of his main points across (now if only he were allowed to do that on the BBC!)…
…The bad news is that during the interview Keiser made his usual remarks about fraud (at about 20:00). And Schlichter said nothing or, at least, nothing in response. Now I appreciate that Schlichter is new to this kind of thing and that he has a book to sell but I think he should have at least said something. To acquiesce while Keiser makes his outrageous claims, to my mind, gives the impression of agreement.
“All corporate taxes fall on households in the end. Companies might be convenient places to get cash from but they are not the people actually carrying the economic burden. It is some combination of shareholders, workers and consumers that are carrying the burden: those getting the social services which they are unable to fund.”
– Tim Worstall, dealing with yet another piece of nonsense from that over-blown socialist buffoon, Richard Murphy. I have to admire Tim’s stamina in how he relentlessly mocks and refutes the rubbish from Murphy. But someone has to do it.
This afternoon I visited the office of The Real Asset Co, and talked with Ralph Hazell (CEO), William Bancroft (Head of operations), and Jan Skoyles (Economist). I have hardly begun to digest the lessons I learned from what they told me. But in the meantime, let me at least supply a link to this video interview that Jan Skoyles did with Steve Baker MP, our favourite politician by some distance here at Samizdata. Jan Skoyles is living proof that you can earn a living as an “economist” without knowing an enormous pile of things which are not so.
More and more, I find myself fearing that Baker is just too good to be true, and that some frightful skeleton will one day soon come tumbling out of his closet. I have absolutely no rational basis for such fears. It is just that the man is a politician.
I recall sitting next to Baker at a Cobden Centre dinner about a year ago, and rather rudely telling him that I expect from him: absolutely nothing, on account of him being a politician. He has already far surpassed my wildest fantasies. This video interview once again had me blinking in disbelief at the sheer uncompromising sensibleness of what he was saying. I did take a nap earlier this evening. Was I dreaming again? Apparently not.
A week and a half ago, I visited the Algarve and Atlantic Alentejo in Portugal. I left my rental car parked in Portimão for a few hours. I thought that the car was locked, but I cannot be one hundred percent certain of that. In any event, a few hours later, I returned to the car, unlocked it from a distance and got in the car. Shortly after this, I realised that a rucksack I had left in the car had been stolen. In it was my passport, a couple of lenses for my digital SLR, a pair of prescription spectacles, a (printed) copy of the latest Vernor Vinge novel, all my spare underwear, various printed travel information, and my Kindle. Things I did not lose included my wallet, my mobile phone, my camera, my favourite lens, and my iPad (all on my person), and my laptop, various cables and chargers, and all my other remaining clothes (in the boot of the car or in my hotel room).
This was highly annoying, and to have things stolen is always a personal violation, but one learns to be philosophical about things like this. If you travel as much as I do, things go wrong occasionally (as they do at home). Much worse would have been a car accident or (worst possible case) anything causing personal injury to me or anybody else. So, I made a visit to the police and the consulate, got replacement documents, and did my best to resume enjoying my trip. Nothing was lost that could not be replaced by spending some money. Annoying, but compared to the total amount of money I spend on rent, or food, or even on travel, a small inconvenience. (Getting to the stage where I can put such things behind me like this has taken some effort, and has not been quite as successful as I am pretending now.)
Places I have visited where I have had things stolen: Cannes; Prague; the Algarve. Places where people have attempted (unsuccessfully) to steal things from me: Buenos Aires; Prague (again); Belgrade.
Places I have visited without the slightest trouble: Moldova; Albania; Ukraine; Kosovo; Transnistria; Bulgaria; Romania; Laos; Vietnam; Kenya; Indonesia; China; Turkey; Mozambique; Most of these multiple times. In a couple of these places I have been overcharged by taxi drivers, but no direct theft has ever looked like happening.
What one learns from this is that tourism related crime goes where tourists go. Places that sound grim and dangerous are often quite safe (at least with respect to petty theft) when you get there. Places that are close and familiar can often be quite dangerous. Tourist resorts are much more of a problem than big cities. I was robbed on the Algarve, but I have never had the slightest problem in Lisbon or Porto. I was robbed in Cannes, but I have never had the slightest problem in Marseilles, even in neighbourhoods that physically look poor and dangerous. Take care in Malaga, but you are probably fine in Seville or Madrid.
One discovery is that rich and poor have nothing to do with it. I have been to places full of rich people in which one can barely walk out on the street without getting into trouble. I have been to extremely poor countries in the third world where one can walk down the road in the middle of the night with $2000 worth of expensive camera gear in plain sight without the slightest danger.
Of course, even when you are robbed, even in tourist resorts, good things sometimes happened. In Buenos Aires, I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book: paint or some other liquid was thrown at me from behind. I had no idea what it came from, and someone then approached me to offer me aid. This is of course an opportunity for someone connected with whoever threw the paint to get close to you, offer you aid, and then steal your possessions when your guard is down. However much you know this and however experienced you are, it is still possible to fall for these tricks when you are tired and in unfamiliar surroundings.
In this instance, I fell for it completely. I was in one of the fancier parts of Recoleta, the most expensive district of Buenos Aires. Such a thing would never happen in Belgravia, which is perhaps why I was off my guard. However, I fell for it. I would shortly have had my bag stolen (which contained almost everything of value to me that I had with me in South America) except for the fact that a local couple saw what was going on from across the street, told the potential thieves to get lost, told me to be more careful, and went on their way. They were gone practically before I knew what was happening. I wish I had later been able to buy them a drink or otherwise thank them properly, but I had no such chance.
Last week, after I had my bag stolen in the Algarve, I got replacement documents from the consulate and came home.
Three days later, a comment apparently from me appeared on my Facebook account, consisting of “contact me please hi have your kindle pedroxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com”.
My Kindle is always connected to the internet. And the Kindle is synchronised with my Facebook account. Pedro presumably worked through the menus, figured this out, and then used this synchronisation to update my Facebook status. I sent an e-mail to Pedro at the given internet address. He sent me an e-mail the next day stating that his father had been walking his dog, and had found the Kindle in the middle of a road 16km from Portimão. He had given it to his son, presumably on the basis that the son had better tech skills and/or English language skills than he had. I sent Pedro my address, and he promised to post the Kindle to me as soon as possible.
I am struck by a couple of things here. Firstly, the kindness of strangers. There are a few people who will take advantage of you and steal from you, but a great deal more who will go out of their way to help you, even when they have no interest in doing so. I don’t actually believe in good karma, but one almost sometimes can. I am also struck by the fact that we are approaching the point where modern technology is almost a menace for the thief. A Kindle is locked to a particular Amazon account and is essentially useless to anyone without access to that account. It is easy to change the account from that account and so sell the Kindle legitimately, but not from the Kindle itself. (This becomes problematic if the manufacturer of the device wishes to use such a power to prevent the legitimate buyer from transferring that right to another subsequent user, but hopefully the market can deal with this.) More and more items that we own are connected to the internet, and more and more can be tracked remotely. Thieves apparently know this, which is presumably why the Kindle was thrown out a car window. (My camera lenses are lost, alas.)
There are privacy implications in this, but there are also good, keeping track of your property implications too. Individuals are often more helpful than large organisations. If you lose your phone, the mobile phone company will disable it to prevent the thief from being able to use it, but they care not at all whether the legitimate owner gets it back. Nor, generally, do the police. (A mobile phone that belongs to me was temporarily lost a year or so back. The mobile phone company immediately blacklisted it, the phone, even though I only asked them to cancel the SIM. The phone was subsequently returned to me, but I have still been unable to get them to unblock the phone despite multiple attempts. Thus I have a nice paperweight.)
However, if a kind individual finds it, they often do have the ability to return it to you. And very often they will. Three cheers for Pedro and his father.
In Ecuador in 2003 a trial began against Texaco who were accused of dumping toxic material in the Amazon. They were ordered to pay $18bn in damages. Chevron bought Texaco, and they are fighting back. Their evidence includes out-takes from the documentary movie Crude. Wizbang links to some of the video (via Small dead animals, via Counting Cats). One of the video’s protagonists talks of using smoke and mirrors and bullshit in the Ecuadorian court to explain away the fact that the scientific reports only showed localised contamination.
Chevron have some web pages with the background and more videos. I like it when companies bluntly defend themselves so publicly. None of this is to do with fracking, but it does shed some light on the opponents of oil exploration.
Meanwhile, an Investors Business Daily piece (via Junk Science) suggests that as of May, the Environmental Protection Agency was not aware of a proven case of water being affected by fracking, and that recent concerns about this may be due to contamination from the chemicals the EPA used when drilling its own wells. Update: Now Instapundit is saying that the EPA struck gas!
All of which suggests we need to be on our toes when faced with evidence of the dangers of fracking.
Here is an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal about how Microsoft’s Paul Allen is faring with his own space venture. Rand Simberg weighs in.
All this private sector space stuff reminds me of this marvellously entertaining book by Victor Koman, although I agreed with an old American friend of mine that the book jacket design was a bit poor.
I hope Dale Amon doesn’t mind my writing about his chosen specialist subject!
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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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