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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Yesterday I had a nice surprise. I was rootling around in the now resting blog of the Oxford (as in Oxford University) Libertarian Society, trying to find the video of a talk I did for them about how to spread libertarian ideas, nearly three years ago now, because I wanted to remind myself about something I had said. I found the video, but also something much better than the video, namely a selection of the more eloquent things I said, cleaned up and clarified by Oxford Libertarian Andrew Gimber. I had not realised until now that this was there, or if I had I had totally forgotten. My belated thanks to Gimber, what with a moderate amount of text being so much better and quicker to take in (to say nothing of more searchable) than a long video performance. It’s the difference between having over an hour to spare, or just a handful of minutes.
And before anyone says, I don’t think vanity linkage like this is quite as vain as it looks. If I don’t link back to my past stuff, nobody will, and I know this.
I wonder what Andrew Gimber is doing now. Something good, for him and for the world, I hope. (This is not, I think, the same Andrew Gimber.) There is an Andrew Gimber on this list, and I think that’s him. Looks good.
I also wonder what the Oxford Libertarians are now up to. Something, I hope.
General point: What you shove on the internet hangs around. Even before the internet, what someone said a long time ago can hang around in someone’s memory and have big long-term consequences, even if whoever said it had no idea at the time that the person with the memory that it stuck in was even listening. That being one of the points that I made in my talk.
“I wish Warren Buffett would emulate his father, Howard Buffett, the late Congressman from Nebraska. Howard Buffett decried the move to the welfare state. He wanted to end it. Also, he wanted the U.S. to get out of the Korean war and move to a non-interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, he was the campaign manager for Senator Robert A. Taft when Taft ran against Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. I have a proposal for Warren that could cut tax rates for those whom he claims to care about and, at the same time, save having to raise tax rates on him and other rich people: get out of all the wars, close all the foreign bases, and save about $500 billion a year. His father would have liked that.”
– David Henderson.
In Italy last week, where I holidayed, I also attended the ISIL conference with a great bunch of fellow libertarian conspirators, such as Kevin Dowd, Tom Palmer and Detlev Schlichter. One of the talks was by Mary Ruwart, who has worked for many years in the medical field and has first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of the US Food and Drugs Administration. She argued that the cost to life in terms of drugs and treatments that never got approved runs to several million people, far outweighing the likely number of deaths from drugs that might have dangerous side-effects.
As Ruwart said, one of the issues that comes up in any discussion about drugs are patents. She disapproves of them – she called the process of getting a patent a “game”; but at the same time she pointed out that if drug firms have no certainty of being able to recoup some of their research costs due to a patent, and those research costs are inflated by the FDA and other regulators, then abolishing patents without first removing such regulators would be bad. In my view, it would be disastrous.
I thought about her talk when I came across this rather lame article by the Economist, in which the publication wonders why US drugs are so expensive and why production of them has slowed. Wow, I wonder why that can be?
Update: the FDA has been carrying out an absurd attempt to hammer dietary supplements. US citizens who want to stop this nonsense can register their views at this site.
Felicity Lawrence. Describing her as a health dominatrix doesn’t really work; some people find that fun. In this article, Why the new McDonald’s menu won’t make us thin, she writes:
The coalition government has chosen to cast public health as a matter of personal responsibility. It takes the classical liberal view that individuals should make their own choices, free from state intrusion. Nudging us to healthier choices is OK, but regulating is not.
On this liberal reading, the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices.
This is a dangerous misrepresentation. It conflates the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. It ignores the fact that business intrudes on our choices constantly with its powerful marketing and sales strategies.
The part where she is projecting is the part I have put in bold type. It is Felicity Lawrence, not the supporters of a belief that individuals should make their own choices, who is conflating the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. She is conflating the two rights so as to get her Guardian audience, generally hostile to business, to give up their residual hippy belief in freedom to do what one likes with one’s own body in return for the quick thrill of an anti-business sugar rush.
Those who believe that individuals should be able to do what they like with their own bodies may also believe that businesses should be free from government constraint. I do. They are both freedoms. They are not the same freedom. I would say that the freedom to do what you like with your own body, and mind, and life, is the fundamental freedom – is, in fact, freedom. The specific freedom of businesses is merely an application of that to certain uses of your time and applied to specific types of groups.
I get all sorts of emails, and this one, from a fairly well known money manager in the UK by the name of Terry Smith, is worth reading in full. It is the text of a letter he has sent to the Financial Times newspaper. The FT is behind a paywall so I reproduce it in full:
From Mr Terry Smith.
Sir, I refer to the debate being conducted in the pages of the Financial Times between those who propose further Keynesian measures, such as Martin Wolf (“Struggling with a great contraction”, August 31), and those who do not accept that they will work, such as Wolfgang Schäuble (“Austerity is the only cure for the eurozone”, September 6).
Such so-called Keynesian measures as advocated by, among others, Ed Balls, Samuel Brittan, Paul Krugman, George Magnus and Barack Obama as well as Mr Wolf have not worked to date, and they will not work. Their advocates seem to assume that their repeated failure to solve our economic problems just means that the medicine must be repeated, which reminds me of Richard Nixon’s motto that “if two wrongs don’t make a right, try three”.
I say “so-called” Keynesians because these advocates seem not to realise that Keynes’ theories did not rescue us from the Great Depression. They are also asymmetric in their application of his theories – calling for ever larger deficit spending, having overlooked the bit about running a surplus in a boom. But above all, they do not seem to realise that they cannot work in a period of debt deflation in which a recession is preceded by the collapse of the banking system, as their current failure is demonstrating.
To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.
The first step in rectifying this situation should be to make a clear and unambiguous statement about the actual debt the UK is carrying.
To give a lead to this, today we have circulated to every member of parliament a tin can emblazoned with the UK debt figure – £3,589bn including commitments for public sector pension commitments, private finance initiative and banking sector guarantees, so that they can see what it is they are metaphorically “kicking down the road” with their present policies. This, ahead of the party conference season, I hope might spur some considered and honest debate on this issue.
It is time for those who wish to lead us out of this crisis to tell people how bad the current situation really is and the painful remedies which will be needed to remedy it.
Terry Smith, Chief Executive, Tullett Prebon, London EC2, UK
I get the impression that this man is not looking to be elevated to the peerage. Good.
To the ordinary person in the street, the idea that we can rescue ourselves from a crisis caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing even more must seem mad. In this respect they are [he/she is] possessed of far more common sense than those who are currently advocating just such a course of action and purport to be our leaders.
– Terry Smith
In a typically overheated article at the Lew Rockwell website, is this extraordinary paragraph by Anthony Gregory:
“More important in U.S. fascism is the role multiculturalism plays in guarding against the accusations of violent prejudice. The U.S. government already addressed racial strife, our textbooks say. If racism remains, it is a problem with the culture and private sector – not the egalitarian state. The war machine and federal government were the saviors of blacks. LBJ, the same man who slaughtered millions of Asians, signed the Civil Rights Act, and so the federal government has been elevated to the status of being the Final Solution to racism, the redemption of America’s past sins. The all-out assault on property rights involved in Civil Rights legislation is itself a form of anti-racist fascism, yet to say so is to be met with incredulous perplexity, at best.”
This is a mixture of half truths and downright nonsense. (The “war machine” a “saviour of blacks”? WTF?). Yes, it is undoubtedly the case that “affirmative action” – which is euphemism for racial discrimination – is wrong and violates equality before the law. It is also true that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation have encroached on private property rights. But Gregory surely knows that some aspects of Civil Rights legislation addressed such indefensible acts as preventing black people – who were taxpayers – from gaining equal access to the public facilities they had paid for, as well as ensuring equal treatment for voter registration requirements, and so on. And given the statist abomination of the Jim Crow laws (enacted during the Progressive era), it is surely legitimate even for someone like Mr Gregory and his Rockwellian chums to accept that after such state-enforced bigotry was removed, it was a matter of natural justice to ensure that black people were put on an equal footing with whites in terms of access to public services that they had paid for.
It is, of course true in strictly narrow terms that a libertarian defence of the right to life and property does not say anything about how one should use, say, such property, nor should it. But life is so much more than simply focusing on such “negative liberties”; my conception of libertarianism is that it embraces social, not just narrowly legal or economic, freedoms. In my view, a free society is one that encourages “experiments in living”, in encouraging, or at least not scorning, the eccentric, the different, etc, with the key proviso that such experimenters bear the consequences of their actions. And I get a strong sense from Mr Gregory that he hasn’t much time for such things, for all his raving about how the US has been a “fascist” country. The problem is that by using that term to describe something like Civil Rights legislation, it leaves our vocabulary looking a bit inadequate when describing, say, Mussolini’s Italy.
On a slightly tangential point, here is Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, defending his recent book – co-authored with Nick Gillespie – from those “paleo-libertarians” over at the Lew Rockwell outfit. What a rum lot they are.
When I first saw the headline, I thought this was a touch of exaggeration by the Daily Mail (hardly my favourite newspaper). But it turns out to be fairly solid. Here is an AP version. My apologies to readers as this item is a few days’ old:
Scottish officials say they may take four heavy children away from their parents after warnings to help their kids trim down have apparently failed. The children are aged one to 11. The parents are obese and have three older children who are also heavy. For the past two years, the family has lived in government housing and had their eating habits scrutinized. Last week, officials in Dundee told the family their four youngest children could be taken into foster care or adopted. A government spokesman said they would act in the children’s best interests.
In the U.S., there have been several cases where obese children have been taken into care after their parents couldn’t help them lose weight.
Now, the issue of whether or when third parties – not just states – should intervene if children are thought to be at risk is not an easy line to draw. (It is one of those issues that I find can divide libertarians, such as intellectual property and immigration). But this case does seem a particularly egregious example of state over-reach. There is no suggestion that the parents of these children are cruel, or unpleasant, nor is there any suggestion that the children are unhappy, or held against their will. None of the usual markers of harm seem to apply, unless there are facts of the case that have not been issued for reasons of confidentiality or legal reasons. About the most that might be said is that the elders are not very successful in encouraging their offspring to be fit. And that might be fair, but I tend to regard much, if not all, of the current obesity obsession as another of those moral panics about which writers such as HL Mencken famously wrote.
This is a bad case, and I hope the children can be restored to their home as soon as possible. It seems bizarre, at a time when, in the aftermath of the riots, we are told about the importance of families, that certain people in governments should be so determined to break them up even where the problems do not appear to be particularly severe. If a child grows up with a loving mother and father and happens to be a bit on the chubby side, that is surely infinitely better than a generation of fit young thugs without fathers.
I have been away for almost 10 days in the lovely Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily, hence my silence. It is a mental health break to be away from emails, internet, TV and the rest. Nothing but good conversation and the company of lots of pulp thrillers, chatty Italian waiters and friendly locals. But I return to work and home with a bump. And of course, we are close to the 10th anniversary of that day of horror in lower Manhattan and Washington DC:
“The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.”
Christopher Hitchens.
For what it is worth, I am not really very keen on this whole idea of there being a “public intellectual”. Who gets to decide that a person holds this sort of role? Anyway, quibbles aside, it is a good piece.
Here are a couple of other paragraphs that stand out:
The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.
In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any “simple” solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and “free speech fundamentalism.” The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of “ancient hatreds” but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called “evil.” And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.
Just when we [have] the strongest possible proof that Keynsianism doesn’t work, someone yells for an encore
– Commenter “J Cuttance” on the Telegraph
One of the self-criticisms I hear a lot from Austrian economics devotees is that Austrianists don’t say what should now be done. They write book after book expounding what should not have been done, but most of their responses to the current mess consist of variations on the theme of: not that. Shouldn’t be starting from here.
So, when I read a report like this one, I get interested. Quote:
Within the next few weeks, signatures will be collected to launch an initial referendum that would require the Swiss National Bank to repatriate all of its gold holdings to within the borders of Switzerland, prohibit it from selling any more of its gold, and require a minimum 20% of its assets be gold.
This initiative is likely to be very popular. The Swiss remember that during World War II, the United States refused to provide access to their gold reserves. More important, since 2000, the SNB has sold 1550 tons of gold – more than a half of its total holdings – mostly at prices below $500 an ounce, and bought European government bonds that have plummeted in value by SF40 billion, compared to a total federal budget of SF60 billion.
This referendum will put the issue of gold as money on the political agenda. The next step is to offer a follow-on initiative permitting the free-coinage of GSF.
The creation of a Gold Swiss franc and the free coinage thereof, along with the repeal of taxation by the U.S. of gold and silver coins used as legal tender, would liberate market participants to generate spontaneously a new monetary order. With government barriers removed, people all over the world will find ways to use gold-backed money to facilitate the exchange of goods and services with their counterparts anywhere in the world, and to engage in saving and investing, lending and borrowing using monies whose value would be anchored in the remarkably stable and trustworthy purchasing power of gold.
Initially, such efforts would have little economic consequence. However, in a world of voluntary exchange, good money chases out bad money, turning Gresham’s law upside down. That is why when the dollar’s value was stable, it was the currency of choice throughout the world.
No one can forecast how this process will evolve. However, we can anticipate that the creation of a Gold Swiss franc and the repeal of tax and legal barriers to the use of gold and silver coins as legal tender will be the antecedent to the reform of today’s paper money system – in the U.S and throughout the world.
Assuming that enough Swiss folks vote for such arrangements, will they do any good? Or does such politicking merely flag up the problem, without going any way towards solving it? No doubt the current Rulers of the World will disapprove of such contrivings and do all they can to abort them, but this kind of thing at least might give the rest of us something to vote for, i.e. against the current Rulers of the World. Mightn’t it?
Something Must Be Done This Is Something Therefore We Should Do It is a powerful force in politics. Schemes like this partake of this force. At the very least, they challenge others to do better.
My thanks to Steven Baker MP for the email that alerted me to this. It’s good to know that he is keeping an eye out for such things, don’t you think?
“Scottish Conservative Party set to disband” screams the title of an article…
Well why not? Scotland already has two Mega-Statiist major parties (SNP and Labour) so what need is there for a third? Indeed perhaps a new party north of the border might actually be, you know… conservative! If that comes to pass, perhaps someone might decide England needs a conservative party too because gawd knows it does not have one at the moment.
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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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