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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Here is part of a press release from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the London-based free market think tank. I could not agree more with what Mark Littlewood, IEA director general, says:
“An overstaffed and overpaid public sector should be the first to face cuts in government spending. It is complete fantasy to pretend that substantial cuts are not required, and it is the public who should feel angry at being expected to support a union campaign which would see their tax money continue to be squandered.
“Public sector workers earn, on average, over £2,000 more than their private sector equivalents1. This is in addition to the more generous pensions they receive and the enormously reduced historical risk of being fired.
“A reduction in the absurdly generous terms for workers in the inefficient public sector is long overdue. It is not an attack on the poor or oppressed, it is an attack on the privileged.”
In a nutshell, much of the UK’s present economic plight can be understood in the light of how, since 1997, the public sector payroll – including all those “private sector” jobs dependent on public contracts, exploded. Pretty much most, if not all, of the big spending rises over which Gordon Brown presided were gobbled up by this enormous rise in public employment. Now of course, if you work in the public sector, you will believe, or at least want to believe, that your job is of great importance, and that those selfish Gradgrinds in Westminster and Whitehall deserve to be attacked. But the point needs to be made that the private sector, increasingly weighed down by taxes and regulations, cannot support this state of affairs; it is an absurdity, as some in the trades union movement claim, to somehow argue that cutting all these public sector jobs will somehow threaten Britain’s economic recovery. Any recovery that relies on an artificial support machine of massive public spending and employment is not a recovery worth having. And remember that what we should be aiming for is to be better off, not simply employed in pointless or destructive “jobs”. If cutting such public sector positions frees up capital for something likely to generate greater wealth overall, that’s great. The question arises, clearly, as to whether this government has the stones to say this over and over. The signs are not particularly encouraging.
Can anyone offer any confirmation or contradiction of this observation, which is one of the comments on this posting about the rights and wrongs of smoking bans:
One of the things I learned when going through insurance sales training was that life and health insurance companies do not take exposure to secondhand smoke into account at all when determining risk categories. Insurance companies have all sorts of super-detailed actuarial information for use in setting rates. None of this information shows any health risks associated with secondhand smoke.
I am actually a bit surprised if that is true. One of the reasons why there has been so much talk of “passive smoking” is that it makes such perfect sense that if smoking is very bad for you, smoke near you day after day would also be somewhat bad for you. This suggests no badness for you at all. Can that really be right?
This comment concerns the USA. I assume there is no particular arrangement there which actually forbids “passive smoking” being inquired into by insurance companies.
LATER: As I should have included in the above, the author of that comment also has a blog.
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)
For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?
I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.
Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.
We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.
My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.
But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.
I am very optimistic it will quickly become an established form of transport
– Patrick Döring, deputy chairman of the German Free Democrats, discussing the fact that long distance bus travel may be about to be legalised in Germany.
Christopher Booker in the Telegraph has another forced adoption story. Or rather he did on Monday, but now he doesn’t.
…Social workers were about to seize a newly born baby for no more reason than their claim that it might be “at risk of emotional abuse”. Just for once, because no court papers had yet been issued, I would be able to report this case in detail, naming names and explaining why it appeared to be yet another appalling miscarriage of justice.
I spoke at length to the horrified mother, who told me how the local social workers wanted to remove her child which, since it was born prematurely three weeks ago, is still in a hospital intensive care unit. She has already happily brought up three other children, the oldest of whom, a bright 21-year-old who has just got a First at university, is doing all she can to help her mother win the right to keep the new addition to the family.
The next day, however, the court papers arrived, imposing a complete blanket of secrecy.
Do you think in your heart of hearts that there must be something more to it than that? Surely these social workers, while twits, cannot be as malicious as this story seems to imply? Have you ever thought, when reading about such a case, “well it sounds shocking, but one can never tell”?
That is the point. One can never tell. One can never make an assessment of these stories because the ancient protections of open justice have been thrown away.
Since the secret system of the Family Courts has denied the press and public the opportunity to assess the evidence in any other manner, one must make a guess as to the likelihood of social workers really behaving in this appalling way based on other cases where details have leaked out.
Here are two accounts of similar cases, in which professionals – an independent social worker and a GP in one case, a judge in another, who were in a position to tell described the behaviour of social workers as “appalling injustice” and “disgraceful […] about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years.”
Oh, and a sample of the sort of evidence that is held to be damning, as if the Cleveland scandal and the others like it had never happened:
One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have “been forced to have oral sex with her father”.
Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is “the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes.” He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese.
I have been thoroughly enjoying reading this book about how the Allies sought – very cleverly – to throw the Nazis off the scent ahead of the invasion of Italy, hence saving potentially thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives. An extraordinary cast of characters is involved, conjuring up the sort of plot-lines that would do credit to any writer of spy fiction. And indeed several of the protagonists on the Allied side were novelists with vivid imaginations.
A current controversy intrudes. Back in WW2, the Allies had the priceless knowledge via the code-breakers of Enigma about the enemy’s plans, and even more vitally, the fact of having cracked Enigma was kept a secret for many years under the various pieces of legislation controlling such matters both during the war and into the Cold War era. So when I read today about the latest moves by the Wikileaks website to publish all kinds of classified military information on the Web, I wonder about what would have happened if, say, a Wikileaks kind of outfit had been around during WW2 and had stumbled upon the kind of facts as described in the book I link to?
Of course, if we had had the internet back in 1939 or earlier, and had the ability to spread information and views around outside the conventional channels of the MSM that existed back then, maybe this would also have been used to weaken or undermine the enemy side as well. (Would a Hitler have prospered in the Information Age?). I remember that in David Friedman’s recent interesting book (also available in an online form) about various trends, he addresses both sides of this question: what happens to privacy in an age of good encryption and ever-increasing attempts by states and other groups to put folk under surveillance.
But even so, it should trouble anyone concerned with security to think that a Wikileaks outfit can put out this sort of material and seems to have no compunctions about doing so. And while Wikileaks may think it is performing a sort of public service, if we are in a war for national survival, say, and we use deception techniques to win, and some self-appointed characters decide to blow the lid on those techniques, then what should the response be? In my view, this is a treasonable act or at the very least an act of aiding and abetting enemy combatants. It goes beyond, I think, the sort of opposition and free speech, including the right to condemn what a government is doing, during wartime. (And by the way, even under anarchism, secrets might be of importance to certain people, so it is no answer to say that such issues are made redundant if we get rid of states).
And it is not just about issues of national security that I think this website is running amok on. Take the world of banking. Some time ago, for instance, Wikileaks published data on individuals who have accounts at an Icelandic bank. Now no doubt the website will claim that it was acting in the public interest, but there are perfectly honest reasons for why people have private bank accounts, such as not giving out valuable information to oppressive governments/criminals (but I repeat myself, Ed) trying to grab that money, or kidnap them for ransom, etc.
And perhaps the man who runs Wikileaks should be glad that some of the older punishments for treason no longer are used in this country. Very glad, in fact.
“Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment. But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.”
– Dinesh D’Souza.
Those mid-term elections in November should be interesting.
I used to be a matron but as a patient I was treated worse than an animal. That was one of the headlines in yesterday’s Sun. I do mean headlines, too. Jean Emblen’s account was not top story but it was right up there among the footballers’ wives. The editor of the Sun thought the readers would go for a story criticising nurses.
When did that happen? When I was a kid everyone was all soppy over nurses. It was considered quite shocking when a 1970s BBC soap opera called, tellingly, Angels depicted them as less than angelic.
We can’t simply attribute this loss in esteem to the NHS. For round about the first half century of the existence of the National Health Service, nurses continued to be loved by all (it is only fair to say there are plenty of people, including those with recent experience of the NHS, for whom that has not changed; a huge amount depends on the individual hospital). So what has caused it? Does it reflect reality – are nurses really not as good as they used to be – or is it just fashion, a last ripple from the wave that knocked politicians over in the 1960s and teachers in the 1970s?
One possible explanation is that nurses are no longer paid that badly. There is nothing like low pay for calling forth guilty affection. Once the pay improved people no longer felt they needed to make up the shortfall with love.
However my impression is that the downward trend on the nurse popularity graph best tracks the increasing moves for the nursing profession to become more… professional. It’s all “nurse practitioners” and degrees these days, and being more like doctors. No one ever had any trouble hating doctors, once the thermometer went down. People think that nurses these days think themselves too grand to change a bedpan.
Is this charge fair? Lucky me: I don’t know. You tell me. All I can say is that it would not surprise me if there was a tendency for both human contact and the dirty but necessary jobs to be de-emphasised in modern nursing, and maybe I can find a way to blame the NHS after all. It is what I would expect to see from an old command economy. Compared to most command economies, the NHS in its early years had a huge amount going for it: a sense of mission was in its collective blood. But as time as passed the blood has thinned, or done something else old and dry and sad that I lack the medical knowledge to build into my metaphor. (The blood of armies dries up in the same way, but then a war comes along and de-mummifies them. Or replaces them. ) An old and somewhat ossified organisation instinctively prefers its staff to have measurable, academic and relatively high status skills rather than unquantifiable, physical and and traditionally low-status ones. But no one was ever loved for academic skills.
In the US, I learn, there has been a similar move from plain old nurses to nurse practitioners, but if the American equivalent of the Sun has started on the anti-nurse stories then I had not heard about it. This might be because US healthcare is, for the moment, not provided by the taxpayer. At least, a lot of it is, but not so visibly. My impression is that the extravagant love for nurses in the past and the extravagant annoyance with them now are both British phenomena.
Christ but I hate the BBC. This morning – probably out of some masochistic urge – I had the BBC Breakfast News channel on. I suppose my only defence is that I wanted to see those goals that England had contrived to score against that footballing colossus, Switzerland. Anyway, one item that came up was the issue of a proposed nationwide minimum drinking price for booze. There is already one in Scotland . There is a very high chance that such a minimum price, which flagrantly breaches the rights of sellers to flog their stuff at whatever price they think fit, will come into law.
Now it is no surprise, really, that the BBC tends to act as unwitting or even witting voice of government-favoured conventional wisdom, but the interviewer on this morning’s show who was giving a representative of the alcohol retailing industry a hard time was particularly bad. This is the guy I mean, by the name of Simon Jack. His biography states he worked as a decade as an investment banker, so presumably the BBC thinks this gives him a terrific insight into the world of business. Well, I don’t know about that – it may be that if this guy was any good at that job he’d be still working in the financial sector and earning zillions. Or maybe he realised that his heart was not in it and preferred to act as early-morning interrogator of businesses instead. This character seriously gets up my nose: a lot of his questioning is hectoring and demogogic, with questions such as: “But how can you defend your profit margins, Mr Evil Banker?”
This morning, he asked about how can the booze industry justify selling product at below cost of production. Surely, he said, this is designed to entice us poor moppets into buying lots of liquor and drinking ourselves into a stupor? Well, if Mr Jack had been awake during his college days while studying some economics, he’d realise that firms routinely sell some items at such cheap prices, even below production costs, to encourage a new market, whether it be for booze, cars or whatever. Free samples and all that. But obviously such pricing policies could not occur indefinitely: firms wish to make a profit. It was particularly weak for the industry lobby man not to state as much, and to assert that the industry is entitled to set its prices how it wants, and that anyway, why should not people be able to buy at prices mutually agreeable to them and the sellers – the vast majority of alcohol consumers do not turn into George Best or Oliver Reed and do not vomit over the pavement. But of course the BBC now endlessly repeats the charge that cheap drink is turning our city centres into beery nightmares and therefore, the rest of us should have to pay more for whatever is deemed to be causing the problem.
The BBC is leading the way as a news organisation that constantly hammers the booze industry, just as, in times past, happened to the tobacco industry. And the BBC Breakfast show, with its mix of hard news and what is a lot of fluffy, lifestyle features with lots of chats on the sofa, is a particularly persistent channel for this sort of temperance advocacy. In some ways, with its red sofas and pretend air of jollity in the morning, it is far more dangerous in this regard than snarling Jeremy Paxman in the evenings. At least you can usually switch channels to a late-night movie and watch Clint or whoever blowing bad people to glory.
A couple of further cricket games between England and Pakistan have now happened. In the first of these, Pakistan surrendered a winning position. Sound familiar? It should. In the second, they never got to a winning position in the first place. England were efficient in both games. I refuse to provide links to mere match reports. Did the Pakistanis lose because they were paid to, or is it merely that they are now utterly demoralised? Probably the latter, but given that one can’t now be sure it is hard to care. That Pakistan’s cricket bosses had to be bullied into suspending the players revealed as having cheated hasn’t helped. Ijaz Butt in particular looks far more like part of the problem that part of any solution.
I’m reading this kind of reaction quite a lot, the one about being shocked, shocked. As in not actually very shocked at all. But the importance of what just happened is not that cricket fans now strongly suspect Pakistan’s cricketers of cheating, but that we now know it. The cheaters are still protesting their innocence, and the wheels of justice will, as is proper, grind slowly on, but the market (i.e. the fans) is already now speaking, loud and clear. Guilty:
Stewart Regan, chief executive of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, said: “The phones haven’t stopped ringing from people wanting to vent their fury and ask whether they can get refunds.
“I’ve fielded several calls and we’ve had numerous enquiries about cancelling tickets. From the club’s point of view we can’t give refunds simply because of a personal opinion about what’s gone on, no matter how much we might agree with them.”
“Might” agree. Hah. Now I’m watching the TV highlights of the game earlier this evening. The crowd is tiny, heavily outnumbered by empty seats. Pakistan cricket will not soon be forgiven by the English county clubs now caught up in this mess. They will want someone’s blood, and since they cannot expect much satisfaction from Pakistan itself any time soon, they will probably look closer to home.
They won’t have far to look. As Michael Jennings said in a comment on this:
Seriously, the judgment of Lord’s and the ECB looks consistently bad. Somehow they missed getting properly involved in the IPL and ended up doing a deal with Sir Allen Stanford because they needed the money, and they then did this deal with Pakistan (who were unable to play games at home because terrorists attempted to kill the last foreign team that went there, and who India wanted nothing to do with) because they had empty stadiums and needed someone to play in them. Meanwhile, they were unable to do such things as cooperate sufficiently with the IPL so that English sides can participate in the Champions League. They seem to have made the wrong choice every time.
Indeed they do. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, there are fears that revenue from Pakistan tour could suffer. Indeed it could.
A free life makes it harder to acquire riches for this is not easy to do without becoming servile to mobs or kings.
– Epicurus
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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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