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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I’ve commented this before, but I can’t help thinking there’s something wrong, some undiagnosed mental condition, afflicting people who exhibit an unnatural interest in the private lives of others. Perhaps at some point in the future this condition will be identified and a treatment devised for it, but until then the appropriate response to someone who thinks a bar of chocolate or a “fat goose at Christmas” is a sign of moral decay is to point them out in the street and utter the traditional condemnation “‘Ee’s a nuttah!”
– Commenter Roue le Jour, who is on a SQOTD roll it seems
I guess it will be interesting to see whether there is any pressure among backbench Tory MPs – or at least some of the more intelligent ones – for the government to try and edge out “Vince” Cable from his post as Business Secretary, following a terrible speech that has been monstered in many quarters, such as here, and here.
The funny thing is, had Cable said something on the lines of “risky gambling by banks and hedge funds has been a problem and has been encouraged by irresponsible central banks”, he’d have a very good point. Had he, in his attack on monopolies, attacked the regulations, taxes and other government moves that drive up barriers to entry, he’d also be correct. But he does nothing of the kind. He’s a sort of economist who, trained from, I suspect, neo-classical textbooks full of elegant supply-demand curves rather than real human beings, imagines that any market that does not have a vast number of identical players with no pricing power or edge is “imperfect”, and therefore in need of correction by government. He ignores how it is the very “imperfections” of the real world – such as differences in tastes, values, levels of knowledge and so on – that give markets their raison d’etre, as understood by the “Austrian” school, with its view of competition as a discovery process, not as a static game full of omniscient Gods.
In fact, the government actions that lead to less flexible markets continue to get worse, which is something Mr Cable seems not to be dealing with. At the moment, the Financial Services Authority, the UK financial regulator, is rolling out a programme of “reforms” called, excitingly, the Retail Distribution Review. The aim, which sounds very noble, is to raise the standard and independence of financial advice. The effect, however, will be to drive hundreds of financial advisors out of business – some industry figures predict that as many as 20 per cent of UK IFAs could go by the time the RDR takes full effect in 2012. This, of course, only worsens the problem of how financial advice is often something that ordinary UK citizens rarely use.
Here is something I wrote before on attacks on the City.
David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:
I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.
The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.
Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.
But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.
In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn’t got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day – puff-puff – the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.
We’ll see. Well, I probably won’t see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.
And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.
Socialism is communism designed by capitalists.
By redistributing income rather than wealth, it meets the proles expectation that somebody else’s money will be given to them, the truly wealthy’s expectation that their capital will not be touched and cripples the higher earners who are only going to be anti-government trouble makers anyway.
– Commenter Roue le Jour
I am not going to attempt a detailed analysis of the shooting of Erik Scott in Las Vegas because it has already been done. I would suggest you read it and then listen to what our own police experts have to say.
I do have opinions of my own on the general situation. I bet we will find some person of coastal liberal persuasion at Costco soiled their knickers at the sight of a perfectly legal weapon and made an hysterical and totally misleading call to 911. With nothing but the terror-stricken voice of an idiot to go on, the 911 operator primed the responding police for a deadly response. Then, to top it off, the responding officers were incompetent.
The officers should be sent to remedial training. But the real guilt seems to me elsewhere: I sincerely wish the person from Costco who initiated the fatal chain of events could be charged with manslaughter.
I will now wait for our more than competent police commentators to chime in…
For a couple of centuries an “Advertisement” in Philosophical Transactions expressly forbade pronouncements by the [Royal] Society as a whole on any scientific or practical matter.
… it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.
That sensible “Advertisement” disappeared in the 1960s when a politically ambitious physicist, Patrick Blackett, was the President.
– From the blog of Nigel Calder, doyen of science writers, via Philip Stott, who does his bit to inject some climate realism into the Radio 4’s Home Planet.
The Royal Society should return to its former path of virtue. And The Lancet would benefit from that motto, too.
Doctor Zero:
ObamaCare is the most powerful job-killing force unleashed against our economy in decades. It dramatically increases the cost of labor, and applies huge fines against companies that resist its mandates. Companies such as Caterpillar, John Deere, Prudential, and AT&T responded by announcing thousands of layoffs. This is a perfectly rational reaction to a bill that dramatically increases the cost of labor, especially when the legislation keeps mutating and producing expensive new horrors, such as the nationalization of student loans that wiped out thousands of jobs at Sallie Mae.
I sort of get much of that, although I would definitely have to follow the second link to see how ObamaCare is nationalising student loans, and to find out what on earth “Sallie Mae” might be. But, speaking more generally about this huge furore, I have a real problem with ObamaCare. Not in the sense that it is causing me to lay off hundreds of my employees, but in the sense that I am finding the arguments about it very hard to follow. Mountains of verbiage have already been written about ObamaCare and many more will follow. But I am afraid I missed the early bits, where the actual blow-by-blow damage that ObamaCare will unleash (is now unleashing) was itemised, briefly and punchily. Anti-ObamaCare writers tend now merely to allude to the assumed harm of it, rather than yet again itemising it. Much is made by critics of ObamaCare of the immense length and complexity of the relevant legislation, which it seems most US politicians have no more read right through than I have. But what, approximately speaking, does it all say?
I suspect I am not the only Brit who feels this way. Not that long ago, for instance, I heard those comedians on Mock The Week take it in turns to denounce Americans for not welcoming ObamaCare, and I knew they were talking out of their smug and self-satisfied arses (especially that little bald one who is smug self-satisfaction personified, if you don’t happen to agree with something he is saying). Death panels? No. It’s free healthcare for those who can’t now afford it, you obese God-frazzled morons. What could possibly be wrong with that?!? Do you all want to die prematurely of terrible diseases and accidents that the British health service cures immediately at no cost?
But had I been on the panel, trying to resist (in particular) the Smug Dwarf’s relentless leftery, I don’t think I would have done a very good job. Most Brits watching, if my reaction is anything to go by, either agreed that all American opponents of ObamaCare are indeed morons, or that they perhaps have their reasons for not wanting it, but that these reasons will for ever be a mystery, probably involving some Americanised version of God.
So, commenters, please fill me (us) in. Please help us Brits – this particular Brit especially – to wrap our brains around ObamaCare. What, briefly, are those “mandates” that Doctor Zero refers to? How are student loans involved? And what else is being inflicted?
I would like to be able to concoct a further posting entitled something like: “A brief but pretty much complete explanation for confused Brits of why ObamaCare is a really bad idea and why so many Americans are right to hate it”. And maybe, with your help, I will be able to do that.
One particular request. What concerns me is not to dig deeply into any particular harm that ObamaCare is doing. What I seek is completeness, combined with as much brevity as can be contrived. In the event that I do manage that follow-up posting that I can now only dream of, I want an American to be able to wizz through it, and say something like: “Yup, that about covers it. That’s why so many of us hate it. I actually don’t think number three is quite as bad as your short description of it implies, and I think number five is far worse even than you say. But, nothing major is missing from that list. Good job.”
Maybe such a posting already exists, and I need only read it, and link to it.
Or maybe (I’ve just been following the links in the quote above, just to check that they work), my question is wrong. Maybe what I really want is a brief guillotine-blow-by-guillotine-blow guide to the entire Obama legislative “achievement”, of which “ObamaCare” is only a part.
Anyway, whatever help anyone can offer along these approximate lines would be most welcome.
Errrr… I have news for you, Cato Institute… Barack Obama was lying.
He never had the slightest intention of going about eliminating Federal government schemes or aspects of such schemes, in the hopes of reducing the overall burden of government.
On the contrary his entire political life has been spent trying to increase the size and scope of government – and to do so in the most corrupt ways possible. Only someone who knew nothing about Barack Obama’s time in politics would be surprised by the hundreds of pages of detailed corrupt wasteful schemes in the “Stimulus” Act, and in the Obama Care Act – and in every other Act he has had passed (the details of which written by such old comrades of his as Jeff Jones – a man who repents of his Communist terrorism as much as Bill Ayers does, i.e. not at all).
Let us say I am wrong – and that Barack Obama is not trying to destroy America and the West in general on purpose (as part of the Cloward and Piven doctrines of spend America to the destruction of “capitalism” that he was taught at all those Marxist conferences he went to whilst a post grad at Columbia)…
…Even if the question of motivation is put on one side, the facts of his record both in the Chicago Machine, and at State level, and then in the United States Senate, where he managed to be even more corrupt and wild spending than Christopher Dodd (one of the two main supporters of the ultra vile “Financial Reform Act” that Obama has just had passed – the other being a creature called Barney Frank), something that might be thought to be pretty much impossible… well, it seems pretty damn obvious what to expect from President Obama.
“But they always knew that Paul”.
No, “with all due respect” the Cato Institute (like Reason magazine) contains some people, not all – but some, who really believed Barack Obama in 2008 – people who never bothered to do the slightest research into the record of Barack Obama – and were abusive (very abusive) to anyone who tried to point out their errors. → Continue reading: I see no reason to give a free pass to the Cato Institute
I would count clubbing as not lost time too, if I had done any. I haven’t. Not even one seal.
– Guy Herbert.
Paul Krugman is often described as a winner of the Noble Prize for economics – Mr Noble set up no such prize, but let that slide (after all good people have sometimes been awarded this prize over the years). However, he is in fact not an economist at all – he is just someone who is called an “economist” because he has the position of “Professor of Economics” at a university (as if a job title describes knowledge).
Paul Krugman has for decades sneered at the idea that economics is about reason and logic – that it is (as the “Austrian School” claims) an a priori subject. On the contrary, Paul Krugman claims that economics is an empirical subject – all about understanding empirical evidence and making predictions.
The links given in this Cafe Hayek featured article show that Paul Krugman does not understand empirical evidence and makes predictions that are wildly wrong – i.e., by his own definition, he is not an economist.
Of course there is an alternative view:
This would be that Paul Krugman does have some grasp of economics – but chooses to support an ever more interventionist government for reasons of political ideology, in spite of the economic harm he knows such a line of policy will cause.
For example, Paul Krugman does not predict that the Obama “Stimulus” spending orgy will succeed (on top, please remember, of all the wild “Stimulus” spending by President Bush) – on the contrary Paul Krugman admits the “Stimulus” absurdity will fail – however he claims that this is because it is not big enough.
Almost a trillion Dollars is “not enough” – and however many trillions of Dollars were spent it would still be “not enough”. Any failure of statism is explained away as the result of there not being enough statism.
Would anyone still like to claim that Paul Krugman is an economist?
There is a new film out, with a fairly strong, leftie vibe about it, called Made in Dagenham, celebrating the campaign by women factory workers in the late 1960s to get the same pay as their male counterparts. It sounds such a self-evidently just cause that no doubt any film-goers will come out of the cinema nodding to themselves about the rightness of the cause and the evil of the chauvinist, exploiter bastards who presided over the previous, unjust state of affairs. Throw in lots of period costumes and some nice background music and this is a sort of feelgood movie, in a way.
The trouble is, as I suspect readers will tell, is that the situation is not quite as simple as all that. As Tim Worstall occasionally likes to point out, a lot of the supposed injustice involved in lower pay for women for doing the same jobs as men has a perfectly rational basis, however politically unpalatable it might be to say so. Here is another one of his articles over in the Guardian (brave man, is Tim).
In part, it is worth remembering that in the far more unionised labour market of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the resistence to women entering the workforce to do the same work as men came from male trade union members, not from the firms. And companies, realising that many women are as talented, if not a damn sight more so, than the men, obviously realised that they could attract such workers willing to work for a slightly lower wage than their male counterparts. Outside unionised businesses, such a difference was likely to be even more marked. It reminds me of the fact that the labour movement, with such features like the closed shop, has often been at odds with the Left’s alleged concerns for things such as equality between the sexes and races. I would be interested to know if this aspect of the labour movement comes out in the film.
I suspect that, absent labour market restrictions such as closed shops and other deliberate barriers to entry, women’s pay would have approached that of the men much faster than it did, but for reasons adduced by the likes of Tim Worstall, there will remain gaps which cannot be blamed on the free market.
I knew next to nothing about this woman but if the statist right and left attack someone as hard as they have her, I get a strong suspicion I might like her a lot.
Listen to this interview of her on Pajamas TV before the primary which she has handily won. Make up your own mind. She certainly hits the Austrian economics and small government buttons in my soul. Libertarians need to get behind this woman in November. If you are in Delaware, volunteer. You can make a really big difference for a small amount of effort.
The media are going to attack her mercilessly. In no time at all the MSM will be telling us horror stories about the loathsome habits of her pet fish (if she has any). Consider this your inoculation against them.
If I can forgive her for belonging to a clan that warred with one side of my family (the O’Neill’s) centuries ago, so can you!
I just have to add this Firefly clip noted by Glenn Reynold:
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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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