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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“Brecht, an East German, was allowed by the Communists to keep his wealth and live at ease in Switzerland – a show dog of Communism. His accomplishments, however, must be seen not as an indictment, but as a ratification of the power of free enterprise. As must the seemingly ineradicable vogue for the notion of Government Control. The free market in ideas keeps this folly as current as any entertainment reviled by the Left as “mindless”. But the fiction of top-down Government Control, of a Command Economy, is, at essence, like a Reality Show, which is to say, a fraud. The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.”
David Mamet, page 3 of his book, The Secret Knowledge. I love his line about NASCAR. The whole book is stuffed with one-liners such as that.
Here is what I wrote a little while ago about Mamet.
Liam Halligan has written a not unreasonable article called We should have listened to Zhu Min years ago – don’t ignore him now:
The “twin pillars” of the world economy continue to totter. Global investors, politicians and the financially-literate general public are wringing their hands about two previously “unthinkable” disasters – the US Congress “closing down” the government of the world’s largest economy and the break-up of the eurozone.
American lawmakers may do a deal this weekend, so managing to raise the US debt-ceiling prior to the August 2 deadline. Europe’s monetary union may, for now, be held together with a bucket-load of political fudge. If so, we would avoid both a US default and a “euroquake”, so averting another “Lehman moment”. I certainly hope we do.
[…]
“It’s no use throwing dollars out of a helicopter,” Guido Mantegna, the Brazilian finance minister, has commented.
“QE amounts to economic hooliganism,” the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, observed last week.
Mantegna and Putin are right. We Westerners won’t admit it.
‘We’ westerners? To hijack an old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Who is “we”, Pale Face? What he is saying is just what Austrian school economist have been pointing out for years.
But he is wrong about sovereign default being a ‘disaster’. On the contrary…the sooner the better, I say. The only cure for the absurdity of bloated state borrowing is for it to become a great deal harder for states to do it… and as there is clearly no political will to tell all the vested interest with their snouts in the trough that the binge is over, not just for the well connected bankers but for the ‘innocent’ voters who are state funded parasites, then the only solution is for lenders to learn that sovereign risk is now actually… risky.
Let even one of the Big National Players default and the money states borrow will dry up like morning dew… and that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
– Ronald Reagan
I did a posting on Transport Blog the other day, about a trip taken by a friend of mine to the Hebrides, that involved a plane landing on a beach, on purpose. The beach in question being Barra Airport.
Michael Jennings, who knows everything, supplied some detail (I’ve cleaned up some of the comment-type blemishes) about the plane in question:
The Twin Otter is famous for being really really good at landing on beaches, gravel, and other difficult runways, as well as airports at high altitude. (I have flown on them in the Himalayas.) de Havilland Canada produced them from 1965 to 1988, and ceased production. A company named Viking Air (also Canadian) was given the contract to produce spare parts for the many airlines operating the aircraft. Eventually, airlines explained to Viking that as well as spare parts, they would like to be able to buy entire aircraft, and so Viking actually put the plane back into production in 2007, and quite a few new ones have since been ordered and built.
So here is a great product literally being brought back into existence, through customer demand. Shades of Classic Coke. Compare and contrast, as they say, temporary governmental contrivances which, despite popular revulsion, never then go away.
Step by step, the world is edging towards a revived Gold Standard …
– Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. My thanks to Detlev Schlichter for alerting me to this piece. Schlichter‘s forthcoming book would appear to have been timed to perfection. I am reading an advance pdf of it now. If you want a copy I recommend you advance-order it now, or you just might have a rather long wait.
I love David Thompson’s ephemera postings, which he does every Friday. Buried in among the fun and games are often things with a bit of a message, in favour of Thompsonism and against horribleness.
So, today, for instance, there is a link to three lists, of top migrant destinations, top emigration countries, and top “migration corridors”, migration corridors being country pairs, from and to. List one says how many people in each country were not born there, and the second list says how many people who were born there have now gone.
I have always believed that how people have been voting with their feet is one of the most potent judgements there can be at any particular moment in history, on the varying merits and demerits of different countries and different political and economic systems. The USSR bombarded the world with high decibel claims about the wonderfulness of itself and of its various national possessions, but could not explain why so many people wanted out, and so desperately, and so few in. How come the Berlin Wall only pointed in one particular direction? How come they were the ones who built it?
Contrariwise, the world’s anti-Thompsonists of an earlier time cursed the hideous exploitation of the emerging sweatshop (then) economies of South East Asia, but could not explain why people would swim through shark-infested waters, in order to be hideously exploited.
Such numbers also register how welcoming or unwelcoming different countries are towards being “flooded” with incomers. The USA, of course, is the country that positively defines itself as the country of migrants. That the USA, now as always, is by far the top migrant destination, leaving the rest in a clump far behind, says it all about the continuing vitality of the USA as the go-to superpower of the world, still, despite all the blunders its rulers are now making and which the USA itself is so good at drawing everyone’s attention to.
Russia and Saudi Arabia must also be doing something right, despite the stories you hear, and at least compared to the alternatives for those flooding in. Money plus labour shortages would be my guesses, in both cases.
The UK features in the top ten both for migration in and emigration out. That is a telling fact, is it not? India and Russia are also on both lists.
The biggest upheavals are surely the big numbers that pertain to countries with small populations. When you talk percentages, Australia looks to me positively USA-like in its eagerness to attract newcomers. That China, despite its colossal size and formidable recent economic vitality, is not on the top destination list is also quite telling, is it not?
These numbers are more than just ephemeral curiosities, I would say.
I have a lot of time of Michael Totten. That does not mean I agree with everything he says but I rate his commentary and reportage more highly than 98% of the Fourth Estate’s professional ‘experts’ from megacorporate media land.
His latest work, Hanging with the Muslim Brotherhood, is an interview with Esam El-Erian and I commend this to you, not just for its informative content but because it may have the same effect on you as it did on me… some laugh-out-loud moments just visualising what the exchange of views must have been like for the exasperated but ever polite Totten and his redoubtable colleague Armin Rosen.
Read the whole thing and perhaps even drop your mouse on his ‘donate’ link as he is worth every penny.
“Revulsion, however justified, is a dangerous counsellor.”
– Bruce Anderson, on the continuing saga of Rupert Murdoch. A good article overall, somewhat spoiled by a daft remark about Australia.
In this, which is about some guys from Loughborough who have decided to mark cities (scroll down a bit) like they are undergraduate essays (Alpha+, Beta+, Beta-, etc.), NickM waxes lyrical about Prague:
The coolest city is Prague. Prague is just mental. I’d happily move there tomorrow but for the language which is something else. Just super-cool. On the Charles Bridge there was a rodent balancer. Some bloke in a monk’s cowl was balancing rodents on a labrador for change. And then you just walk past where Kepler lived and customer service is spot-on and it was about a quid a pint for most excellent beer right in the city centre and the food was good quality and good value. Went to a steak house run by former firemen who donned the hats when they put the heat to the meat. Bloody good steak that was. And then down by the river and a load of blokes ride past me in Edwardian garb astride penny-farthings. Prague is just ineffably cool. Just wandering around is wonderful. Just doing that brought me by chance to the church where the killers of Reinhardt Heydrich had holed-up. That was poignant. And then there is the Museum of Communism. This is not a free museum. It makes a point of being a for profit enterprise. It advertised, when I was there, with a Russian doll with fangs. It gives it’s address as, “Above McDonalds and opposite Benetton.”. It didn’t need to add, “And fuck off Lenin”. A joy to behold.
Here endeth the broadcast from the Czech tourism bureau.
But he adds a warning:
But catch it while you can and before EU membership fucks it.
Well, EU membership doesn’t seem to have fucked London yet, despite decades of the EU trying everything they can think of to accomplish that. London, according to the Loughborough guys, is equal top (Apha++) with New York. NickM goes further. He reckons New York is overrated and has London top on its own, as the greatest city in the world “bar none”. He doesn’t say why, however.
Personally, I love London, because I live here and I just do. But I do not know where I think it ranks in the great city stakes because I seldom leave it, and hence can’t compare it with other urban greatness contenders.
I have been to Prague, which I thought was pretty good. The middle is amazing, wall-to-wall listed buildings, as we would say in London. As I assume is the case in Prague too, i.e. you may not smash it down and replace it with a concrete blockhouse, just because you “own” it. Which I understand. But the uninterruptedly historic nature of the centre means that nothing new can now be built. In other words, the centre of Prague feels like a film set, and will feel more and more like one as time passes. See also: Paris.
I like this, towards the end of a long comment from Michael Strong, on this piece by Clay Shirky:
Democracy is a fabulous way to prevent the most horrible errors such as the massive famines, death camps, and large-scale wars of aggression that are characteristic of totalitarian regimes, but one should no more imagine that democracy is a finely-tuned instrument for determining the public good than that a hack saw is suitable for brain surgery.
“Deliberative” democracy, i.e. the sort less like a hack saw, doesn’t work beyond about 10,000 people, he says.
See also Amartya Sen, who also admires what the hack saw can do.
Being an American with a knowledge of history, Strong does not claim that democracy prevents civil war. But I would say that democracy does make civil war far less likely, provided certain other conditions are also met, like a relatively static political entity and not too much tribal voting (i.e. a willingness of at least some voters to vote this way or that way, depending).
In many ways (but not the most important ways), democracy is civil war. Which is precisely why it works as well as it does as a substitute for civil war. Whoever wins the democracy civil war would probably also have won the real thing, using not unrelated methods – bribes, threats, propaganda barrages, opinion polls, friendliness towards turnable enemies, treachery towards dependable friends, and so on and so forth. That being so, the losers take their defeat. Instead of contesting the result of the election by force (i.e. starting a real civil war) they wait for the next round.
Which, by the way, means that the reasonable certainty that there will be a next round is crucial to democracy’s effectiveness. It is often said of Hitler that he was impeccably democratic. He was indeed democratically elected, but promptly cancelled all subsequent elections. At best, democratically speaking, he scores one out of two. Other political strong-arm men, who got power by old fashioned civil warlike methods, but who then left a democratic legacy, that is, they contrived (or at least permitted) the circumstances which would allow elections in the future, get denounced as “totally undemocratic”, when they also score one out of two. And which election matters more, the last one, or the simple fact of the next one, when it comes to how safe and sound life would be right now?
None of which means that I love democracy, merely that I prefer it to civil war, famine, concentration camps etc.. Cue clichés about democracy being the worst system, except … More to the point, here’s what looks like another quite good link to the sort of notions I and Michael Strong agree with.
One of the many reasons why I would like to live for more like the next two centuries, rather than the mere two decades which is my likely best shot, is that I would love to see what happens to democracy in the next little clutch of decades. Currently, it is just growing and growing in strength, for all of the above reasons. I’m not the only one who wants a quiet life, and will settle for a disappointing one if that’s the price to be paid. But, will democracy last? Will it, for instance, attach itself to the emerging government of the world which I believe we are now witnessing in our time? If it does, will it then do anything to prevent global civil wars? If democracy fades, what might replace it?
When I say “democracy” please understand that by that I mean big noisy elections deranging regular television for weeks at a time, political parties, legislative assemblies of self-important bores, lying, cheating, thieving, grandstanding, moral self-aggrandisement and relentless disappointment for almost all concerned, bar only a tiny few particularly rapacious and particularly lucky winners. I do not mean that fatuous construct of political malcontents known as “real democracy”, as in: everything the malcontent wants from democratically elected politicians, however far fetched, such as financial security for all (especially him), equality for all (ditto), openness of decision-making (by others rather than in the unlikely event that he is deciding anything of importance), environmental perfection, and immediate answers to his mad letters or emails to politicians, telling him that his mad arguments, no matter how numerous or how many CAPITAL LETTERS they may contain, have all triumphed.
Speaking of political malcontents, what I want is free markets in everything, a cheap internet connection, a cheap digital camera with a twiddly screen which takes perfect pictures with just the one (mega-mega-zoom when I want it) lens, and to stay comfortably alive for at least the next two centuries (see above). But, I never refer to these desires as “real democracy”.
Steve Baker, the MP whom we here actually rather like, has a piece in the latest Jewish Chronicle, which makes what seems to me like a very important point. I have this point alluded to vaguely, but never spelled out. It is that the outrageous behaviour of the merchant banking fraternity in recent years is as much a product of bad bank regulations as it is of mere capitalistic greed.
It being the Jewish Chronicle he’s contributing to, Baker alludes to some scales that are criticised at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 11 (which American readers may consider rather appropriate, what with the times we (and they) are now living in).
The particular rules that Baker zeroes in on are the accounting rules that define profit:
Among other problems, IFRS accounting rules incentivise trading in derivatives by enabling unrealised, perhaps fake, profits to be booked up-front, leading to large but unjustified bonuses and dividends. They grossly inflate profits and capital and discourage banks from making prudent provision for expected loan losses. They also discard the time-honoured principle of prudence embodied in UK company law. In doing so, IFRS gravely weakens the audit function and the vital check it imposes on bank management. This undermines effective corporate governance in banking. The upshot is that IFRS makes bank accounts highly unreliable; no-one has a true view of our banks’ financial strength. All this contributed greatly to the financial collapse. IFRS made banks appear more profitable than they were. This led them to imprudent expansion, to payments of bonuses they could ill afford to make and to inadequate provisioning for likely losses.
I am not qualified to second guess Baker on this. But I do know, as a general principle, that when one observes something going wrong with the world, one should not immediately assume that yet more laws and regulations are needed to curb whatever it may be. Rather, one should ask what laws or regulations – laws or regulations already in place – are causing or at the very least greatly exacerbating the problem in question, and should accordingly be got rid of.
Christopher Hitchens – I hope he can fight his cancer as long as possible – has this crackerjack of a piece about Patrick Leigh Fermor, the soldier, explorer, journalist and raconteur who recently died at the age of 96:
“Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn’t look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions. (He had also just finished, for a bet, translating P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Great Sermon Handicap into classical Greek.) That other great classicist and rebel soldier T.E. Lawrence, pressed into the service of an imperial war, betrayed the Arabs he had been helping and ended his life as a twisted and cynical recluse. In the middle of a war that was total, Patrick Leigh Fermor fought a clean fight and kept faith with those whose cause he had adopted. To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one.”
Marvellous stuff. I have one of Fermor’s books on the shelf, as yet unread. I really look forward to dipping into it soon.
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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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