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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There was a time when the cry of liberals everywhere was that the State should keep out of the bedroom – no longer.
Andrew Brown of the Guardian has written an article entitled Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians.
I think it should worry any person who in any aspect of his or her life is a minority or who might one day be part of a minority.
A law you like is passed; it coerces those you dislike. You rejoice, you “liberals”. But the wheel turns. You do not have to die old in order to live long enough to see what was once persecuted tolerated and what was once tolerated persecuted.
As regulars may know, there is no hard editorial line in these parts about certain views, such as intellectual property rights (steady on, old chap, Ed). Take the case of the “whistleblower” site Wikileaks. Samizdata’s founder, Perry de Havilland, has come round to taking the view that whatever collateral damage might be caused by Wikileaks, that the benefits outweigh the bad. I am less sanguine than that; I fear that the activities of Wikileaks may make governments become even more secretive. I admit that much of this stems around attempts forecast the unknowable. For all I know, Perry may be proven right and my reservations are unfounded.
But as they say about making omelettes and breaking eggs, a lot of eggs can be broken on the way to culinary goals. And this latest story, concerning a fired Julius Baer banker who has decided to publish reams of client data on Wikileaks two days before he goes before a court, is instructive. Sure, some people who use offshore bank accounts via Zurich or wherever are up to no good, and deserve to be exposed. This is particularly the case if such persons are politicians who favour high taxes, socialist economics and the rest. When it turns out that such folk are salting away their wealth in Zurich, Zug or Geneva, it is delicious to see their discomfiture. But – and it is a big but – many people who bank offshore are not primarily looking to hide ill-gotten gains or adopting a double standard; they are people who wish to take advantage of free capital movement and “vote” with their wallets for a low tax jurisdiction. “Exit” is often more powerful than “voice”; the ability to leave a jurisdiction, as I have said before, is one of the few incentives to make oppressive regimes marginally better behaved.
Consider what Wikileaks might want to expose next: health records? The insured art collections of certain people? You can see how leaking such data could be a gift to would-be kidnappers and extortion artists. This is not a theoretical issue. Dan Mitchell and Chris Edwards, in their book, “Global Tax Revolution: the Rise of Tax Competition and the Battle to Defend It”, published in 2008 by the Cato Institute, point out that in some parts of the world, a high proportion of individuals bank offshore because their domestic governments have habitually robbed them in the past. Disclosure of financial details can lead to a person having his daughter’s body parts mailed through with a letter threatening further horrors unless a payment is made. Bank privacy is not, therefore, something that only criminals take advantage of, although that business is often portrayed that way.
Like I said, omelettes and broken eggs. We’ll see how this dish turns out.
This posting is about politics in the USA. Please realise that it is a simplification, what mathematicians call a first approximation, more true than false, and sufficiently true to be worth saying so that it may perhaps then be modified and qualified towards the actual truth.
I ought also to admit that I have never set foot in the USA, and that I got the notions that follow from the Internet, and before that from watching (as I still now watch) USA television shows (mostly comedy and cop shows). We here in Britain get lots of those. I freely admit that distance, instead of lending clarity to my eye, could merely have lent and be lending bullshit to it. In fact, I do admit it. But the bullshit it has lent includes the kind of bullshit that wins and loses USA elections. First approximation truth about what is being perceived, about what big bullshit picture is being believed in, is often sufficient to win or lose an election. For as we all know, a big part of reality in politics is perception. Voters in the USA get a lot of their ideas about politics in the USA from the Internet and from television shows, or so it says on the Internet and on television.
So here goes.
In political USA now, there are now four important groups of people. There are Democrats, Old School Republicans, Tea Partiers, and Voters. Political outcomes were determined by what the Voters decided about the first two. They are now determined by what the Voters decide about the other three.
Voters used to think that Democrats were good people with bad ideas, clever, but mostly only at excusing their bad ideas. Democrats sincerely believed in bloating the government, taxing, regulating and generally screwing things up. But they applied these bad ideas to all, without fear or favour. Personally, they had blue collars and were honest hardworking folks. They did not lie or cheat. They looked you in the eye and treated you right.
Voters used to think that Old School Republicans were bad people with good ideas. Republicans believed in business success, low taxes, less regulation, and generally getting the US economy motoring along. Trouble is that they were also rich and nasty snobs, and corrupt. They used their grasp of economics mostly to get rich themselves. Politically, they applied their ideas only in ways that suited them. If a tax or a regulation happened to suit them or their huge country club network of rich and nasty and snobbish friends, then they would, on the quiet, be for it. For them, business-friendly government meant a government friendly to their own businesses. If, on the other hand, your collar was blue, they’d deregulate and tax-cut the hell out of you, for the good of all, and for the good of themselves especially.
Hard to choose, wasn’t it? No wonder it was a dead heat, decade after decade. Good but stupid idiots versus clever but sneaky bastards.
It still is a dead heat, between Democrats and Old School Republicans, but this is because things are now moving towards Voters thinking that Democrats are bad people with bad ideas, and that Old School Republicans are bad people with bad ideas. Democrats now look like (or are being revealed as always having been) greedy and malevolent bastards with the same old bad ideas as ever. Old School Republicans are the same rich and greedy snobbish bastards they always were, but are now seen to be infected by (or revealed as always having believed in) bad ideas much like those of their opponents.
Enter the Tea Party.
The Tea Partiers started out as people whom the Voters regarded as dubious people with dubious ideas, and are moving towards being people whom the Voters believe to be …
I need some way to emphasise this next bit. Pay careful attention. I know, I’ll put the next five words into the title of this posting.
… good people with good ideas. The Tea Partiers have good ideas, which they sincerely want to apply to all without fear or favour. They are good people who work or worked for their living, will look you in the eye and treat you right, no matter what colour your collar, or anything else about you.
The Tea Partiers thus threaten to destroy both the Democrats and the Old School Republicans. They threaten to destroy the Democrats by destroying them, and to destroy the Old School Republicans by replacing them with different Republicans, Tea Party Republicans.
The Democrats say that the Tea Partiers are “extreme” Republicans, Republicans who are even nastier. They wish. The Tea Partiers are indeed creating a new sort of Republican, but not an even nastier Republican. They are creating nice Republicans. Electorally, the Tea Partiers are cleansing the selfish richness and snobbishness and nastiness out of the Republican brand, leaving the ideas that the Republicans appeared once to believe in untouched, and renewed in strength and quality. If the Republican brand resists too much, the Tea Partiers will destroy it and make another.
The recent financial melt-down is, of course, crucial to all of the above. In a crisis, ideas matter. And the Internet, the new idea spreader, is also crucial. USA citizens need no longer submit to being told what they think about bad times, by the bad people with bad ideas who are to blame for these bad times. Democrats are being revealed as nasty, by the melt-down and the Internet. Old School Republicans are being revealed as stupid, by the melt-down and the Internet. The Tea Partiers are being revealed as being good people with good ideas, by the melt-down and the Internet. No melt-down and no Internet, and you are back to the old dead heat between nice idiot Democrats and sneaky bastard Old School Republicans. And the Tea Party? Without the melt-down and the Internet, there is no Tea Party. (According to television, there is, still, no Tea Party, only criminals.)
No wonder the Democrats and the Old School Republicans hate and fear the Tea Party and are trying anything and everything they can think of to make it seem like bad people with bad ideas. Trouble is, all that the critics of the Tea Party can now think of to say about the Tea Party just adds to the impression that such critics are nasty and stupid bastards.
This is a snapshot of now, not a prophecy about the next century. This is how USA politics is now and the direction that USA politics is moving in now. I don’t say that things will continue this way indefinitely. In particular, how will the Tea Partiers take to being part of the government, to having to grapple face-to-face with the melt-down? The continuing melt-down and the Internet might then turn round and reveal the Tea Partiers to be just another bunch of good idiots or nasty bastards, or just nasty idiots. But, the melt-down and the Internet are not doing that now. They are doing the exact opposite of that.
Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.
It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.
Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly ‘grass roots’ movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover ‘individual defence’ is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists… the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.
But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that… well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain’t going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.
“If you wanted to fly and there were no supervisory authority in the airline industry and no regulations enforcing safety standards, you would be very reluctant to fly fledgling airlines. You would prefer the established ones that had the track record and the reputation. So a complete lack of safety regulations in the airline industry would favour established firms, making the entry of new ones impossible and killing competition and consumer choice.”
Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales, from page X (in the Roman numeral segment) of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.” Published in 2003.
This is an interesting defence of government-imposed safety standards. I am not wholly convinced by this line of argument; it is, for sure, an interesting way of trying to show how government regulation actually stimulates rather than restricts entry into a particular line of business.
My take is that if a fledgling airline, say “Ultra-Cheap Airlines Inc.,” can persuade investors and others to get it started in business with a few aircraft and so on, then the staff on the aircraft – such as the pilots – will not set foot into an aircraft if they fear that safety has been compromised, or if the aircraft are poorly maintained. Pilots are not usually self-destructive, as far as I can tell. In fact, a debutant airline business would bend over backwards to show customers that it had set high standards, get consumer watchdog organisations and other certification providers to give it a “seal of approval”. What the authors of the quote don’t seem to understand is how the “established” airlines got to be in that positions in the first place. Presumably, they had to start by persuading a highly nervous customer base that flight was safe, or at least, not lethal.
And of course, if the standards imposed by regulators are particularly onerous, then it is hard to see how a small business operating a few aircraft could afford to compete with the big boys. Regulations are a form of barrier to entry, much in the same way that extensive licensing of doctors is designed, quite deliberately, to regulate the number of people working as physicians.
This book is generally pretty good, however; it is interesting to read this book alongside the Martin Hutchinson/Kevin Dowd book about financial markets that I quoted the other day.
“So 2011 is the year of the “beneficial crisis”, when the EU will try to exploit short-term economic hardship in order to eliminate the powers of national governments and to create a new pan-European political structure. If it succeeds, it may go on to become a great world power. If it fails, it will start to revert to a collection of nation states.”
– Peter Oborne
He makes a persuasive argument that as far as the architects of the EU superstate were concerned, the sort of crises we are living through – such as the Irish/Greek debt problems – are not problems for the eurozone, they are actually very useful stepping stones towards creating their own new version of the Holy Roman Empire, except that unlike the HRE, the new state will be one run on corporatist, heavily regulated, lines.
To hang your head when you are not guilty is an immoral act.
Matt Welch, over at the Reason Hit & Run blog, comes across this piece of nuttery from the land that gave us Dan Ackroyd and John Candy. How sad and oppressive that nation appears. Of course, there is no reason for anyone else to gloat: in Britain, we have more than our fair share of censors and wannabe controllers of supposedly offensive messages.
Canada does seem to be prone to a lot of this sort of nonsense. Mark Steyn, a Canadian national now living in New Hamshire, has had his problems with self-appointed guardians of what is considered to be acceptable to say and write.
My old man, when in the RAF in the 50s, once nearly emigrated there to serve in the Canadian air force. You might now be reading me with a Toronto or Vancouver dateline. Oh well, Dad chose to move into farming instead.
Erratum: I previously said John Belushi was Canadian. He was not. Sorry for the error.
David Henderson, over at the EconLog blog, has astute observations to make about the statements made by a parent of the girl murdered by the Arizona shooter. I recommend you read it all. It is probably not the sort of article to appeal to Paul Krugman, who is now well on the way to achieving the status of what the swearblogger Obxnoxio the Clown calls “a weapon’s grade cock-end”.
Here is more on Krugman’s descent, over, at all places, the Economist.. Even that organ of high-minded opinion is starting to publish attacks on him. Or maybe its editors are starting to take note of our own Paul Marks.
“The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?…[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.”
The quote is from Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist and libertarian. The race to get your side’s definition in first perfectly describes the frenzy of the left wing media establishment to link the murders carried out by Jared Loughner to the right, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin. I posted about the contrast between Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky’s haste to explain Loughner’s murders and his reluctance to explain Nidal Hassan’s murders here.
Over the last few days further evidence has emerged that Loughner was (a) simply a drug-addled madman, judging from his strange pseudo-logical screeds on YouTube and (b) had began to fix his mad rage on Gabrielle Giffords in 2007, after she gave what he regarded as an inadequate answer to his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” At that time Palin was barely known outside Alaska.
A prescient remark from Thomas Szasz, then. Yet anyone who knows anything of his work and writings will have predicted that I am about to say that an apt quote is not his only relevance to this situation. Szasz is famous for opposing the many authoritarian crimes of the psychiatric profession: among them imprisonment without trial or appeal, assaults under the name of “treatment” (such as lobotomies, electric shocks, injections of drugs against the patient’s will), and collusion with the state to define dissent and eccentricity as mental ills. All very great dangers and he was right to oppose them, as he was right to oppose the prohibition of drugs.
And yet – there is Jared Loughner and the lengthening list of those like him. Lougher was is (Why do I keep saying was? He is alive and in custody!) a drug-addled madman who killed six people. “He should have been locked up before this” does not seem an unreasonable thing to think.
Clayton Cramer is a former libertarian. His article Mental illness and mass murder contains food for thought. This 2007 post by Brian Micklethwait is also relevant. I would welcome your opinions.
I know, my friends, that you are concerned about corporate power. So am I. So are many of my free-market economist colleagues. We simply believe, and we think history is on our side, that the best check against corporate power is the competitve marketplace and the power of the consumer dollar (framed, of course, by legal prohibitions on force and fraud). Competition plays mean, nasty corporations off against each other in a contest to serve us. Yes, they still have power, but its negative effects are lessened. It is when corporations can use the state to rig the rules in their favor that the negative effects of their power become magnified, precisely because it has the force of the state behind it. The current mess shows this as well as anything ever has, once you realize just what a large role the state played. If you really want to reduce the power of corporations, don’t give them access to the state by expanding the state’s regulatory powers. That’s precisely what they want, as the current battle over the $700 billion booty amply demonstrates.
This is why so many of us committed to free markets oppose the bailout. It is yet another example of the long history of the private sector attempting to enrich itself via the state. When it does so, there are no benefits to the rest of us, unlike what happens when firms try to get rich in a competitive market. Moreover, these same firms benefited enormously from the regulatory interventions they supported and that harmed so many of us. The eventual bursting of the bubble and their subsequent losses are, to many of us, their just desserts for rigging the game and eventually getting caught. To reward them again for their rigging of the game is not just morally unconscionable, it is very bad econonmic policy, given that it sends a message to other would-be riggers that they too will get rewarded for wreaking havoc on the US economy. There will be short-term pain if we don’t bailout these firms, but that is the hangover price we pay for 15 years or more of binge lending. The proposed bailout cannot prevent the pain of the hangover; it can only conceal it by shifting and dispersing it among the taxpayers and an economy weakened by the borrowing, taxing, and/or inflation needed to pay for that $700 billion. Better we should take our short-term pain straight up and clean out the mistakes of our binge and then get back to the business of free markets without creating an unchecked Executive branch monstrosity trying to “save” those who profited most from the binge and harming innocent taxpayers in the process.
What I ask of you my friends on the left is to not only continue to work with us to oppose this or any similar bailout, but to consider carefully whether you really want to entrust the same entity who is the predominant cause of this crisis with the power to attempt to cure it. New regulatory powers may look like the solution, but that’s what people said when the CRA was passed, or when Fannie and Freddie were given new mandates. And the very firms who are going to be regulated will be first in line to determine how those regulations get written and enforced. You can bet which way that game is going to get rigged.
I know you are tempted to think that the problems with these regulations are the fault of the individuals doing the regulating. If only, you think, Obama can win and we can clean out the corrupt Republicans and put ethical, well-meaning folks in place. Think again. For one thing, almost every government intervention at the root of this crisis took place with a Democratic president or a Democratic-controlled Congress in place. Even when the Republicans controlled Congress, President Clinton worked around it to change the rules to allow Fannie and Freddie into the higher-risk loan market. My point here is not to pin the blame for the current crisis on the Democrats. That blame goes around equally. My point is that hoping that having the “right people” in power will avoid these problems is both naive and historically blind. As much as corporate interests were relevant, they were aided and abetted, if unintentionally, by well-meaning attempts by basically good people to do good things.The problem is that there were a large number of undesirable unintended consequences, most of which were predictable and predicted. It doesn’t matter which party is captaining the ship: regulations come with unintended consequences and will always tend to be captured by the private interests with the most at stake. And history is full of cases where those with a moral or ideological agenda find themselves in political fellowship with those whose material interests are on the line, even if the two groups are usually on opposite sides.
– Professor Steven G. Horwitz, writing in late September 2008, in a piece entitled An Open Letter to my Friends on the Left. This evening, Horwitz will be giving a talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, entitled An Austrian Perspective on the Great Recession 2008-2009.
“It might be more appropriate if the Sveriges Riksbank would end the Economics Nobel Prize as a failure: strictly, it isn’t a true Nobel at all; it was not part of Alfred Nobel’s legacy, but a much later add-on to pander to the economics profession’s vain pretensions of scientific respectability. If we judge a science by the hallmark of predictability, then the predictions of economists are no better than those of ancient Roman augurs or modern taxi drivers; alternatively, we can judge by its contribution to “scientific” knowledge, in which case the contribution that modern financial economics has made makes us wonder if the agricultural alchemist Lysenko shouldn’t have got a Nobel himself; or we can judge it by contribution to the welfare of society at large, in which case the undermining of the capitalist system, the repeated disasters of the past 20 years, the immiseration of millions of innocent workers and savers, and the trillion dollar losses of recent years surely speak for themselves.”
– Alchemists of Loss – How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System, by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchison. First published in 2010. Page 86.
Now having read it, I cannot recommend this book too strongly. Some of the discussion about modern financial theory – and its baleful consequences – is quite complex, but the authors write with a verve and eye for drama that makes this a very readable book. In my view, it is the best study of what has happened, and more importantly, spells out in practical, thoughtful ways as to what should be done.
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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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