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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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:
An honest leftie? In the American MEDIA? Who’d a thunked it!
Lawrence O’Donnell: Yes. And I’ve been a liberal for so long that I still call myself one. I didn’t change to “progressive.”
THR: But you have referred to yourself as a socialist.
O’Donnell: Yes. A practical European socialist which, as it turns out, we all are, if you know that Social Security … is a socialist program, and that Medicare is a socialist program and that all economies of the world are mixed with some capitalism and some socialism and they just vary in their degrees.
THR: So you have no objection when conservatives call President Obama a socialist?
O’Donnell: No. But if they’re honest about it, they would call themselves socialist, too. Newt Gingrich preserved the socialist state. He never once introduced a bill to repeal Medicare.
THR: Would you object if a Republican introduced such a bill?
O’Donnell: No, because I think it’s an honest position. I hope Rand Paul does if he becomes a senator. There are people who honestly hold themselves in opposition to socialism. But there isn’t a single one in the U.S. Congress who does.
True enough.
This is an idea with logical force, many practical attractions and great philosophical appeal. It is courageous. It is clever. It stands, in short, no chance of success.
– Matthew Parris, underlining that practical politics runs on interest, not intellect.
The author of this article, “An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism”, Micah White, is rightly horrified by the ideas of Pentti Linkola. Note that the url of that link, which seems supportive of Linkola although I do not know if it is his own, describes him as an ecofascist. The page of quotations seems to back up that description fairly well, and it will not come as a surprise to readers of this blog that Mr Linkola advocates that we learn alike from “the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades.”
It is sad, then, that Micah White’s own article, though certainly expressing nicer opinions than Mr Linkola’s, itself advocates the suppression of speech that Mr White does not like. Emphasis added in the following quotes:
The future of environmentalism is in liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume. Rampant, earth-destroying consumption is the norm in the west largely because our imaginations are pillaged by any corporation with an advertising budget. From birth, we are assaulted by thousands of commercial messages each day whose single mantra is “buy”. Silencing this refrain is the revolutionary alternative to ecological fascism. It is a revolution which is already budding and is marked by three synergetic campaigns: the criminalisation of advertising, the revocation of corporate power and the downshifting of the global economy.
and
Democratic, anti-fascist environmentalism means marshalling the strength of humanity to suppress corporations. Only by silencing the consumerist forces will both climate catastrophe and ecological tyranny be averted.
“Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn’t all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution. What applies not only to people in the past who couldn’t have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don’t. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don’t, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology.”
David Friedman, speculating on what is the right way to decide if a person is, or is not, a nutcase.
Oh, it’ll change. We must always strive to avoid the common misconception that we live at the end of history. Humanity has a very long time ahead.
In the shorter term, there will be a reaction against the current hegemony. The key thing for us now is to strive to be the ideologists of it when it happens; last time that role was grabbed by the marxists.
We’ll win this thing one day. Not next week. But we will win. We will win because liberalism is the only ideology compatible with sustainable advanced civilisation; all the competing ideologies, of Left and Right, are holdovers from more primitive social/technological stages of existence. We may never see it (but we may; history moves faster than we think) but our descendants surely will. Without running away anywhere.
– Redoubtable serial commenter Ian B
Jeff Randall states the bleedin’ obvious…
Cuts, cuts, cuts. At this week’s Trades Union Congress, delegates talked of little else. George Osborne’s plans for reductions in government spending were denounced by his adversaries as “eye-watering” and “blood-curdling”.
[…]
This is what happens when the state is shrunk, right? Er, not quite. In fact, not at all. In terms of cash flowing out of the Treasury’s coffers, there is no evidence of cutting back. Total government outlay is set to go up this year, next year and every year thereafter to 2014-15.
According to estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the figures will be £696 billion in 2010-11 (up from £669 billion in 2009-10), then £699 billion, £711 billion, £722 billion and £737 billion. These sums are not inflation-adjusted, but even so, they belie the idea that a demon barber is about to “polish off” the Budget and stuff its remains into one of Mrs Lovett’s delicious meat pies.
The lunatics took over the asylum many years ago and all that has changed is that a different bunch of lunatics are in charge now. How could anyone have expected anything else from someone like that jackanapes Cameron? Moreover he has been making the fact he never intended to shrink the state perfectly clear to anyone who has actually been paying attention for quite some time.
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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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