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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“If spending on munitions really makes a country wealthy, the United States and Japan should do the following: Each should seek to build the most spectacular naval fleet in history, an enormous armada of gigantic, powerful, technologically advanced ships. The two fleets should then meet in the Pacific. Naturally, since they would want to avoid loss of life that accompanies war, all naval personnel would be evacuated from the ships. At that point the US and Japan would sink each other’s fleets. Then they would celebrate how much richer they had made themselves by devoting labor, steel, and countless other inputs to the production of things that would wind up at the bottom of the ocean.”
– Thomas E. Woods Jnr, in Meltdown: A free market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse. (Page 105).
This is a marvellous, succinct and pretty devastating indictment of bailouts and an excellent little primer on the Austrian school’s analysis of the business cycle and the role of money. I thought I knew quite a lot about the subject but this book explains the idea of money, as a claim on resources, and the importance of understanding the balance of supply and demand for savings, quite beautifully. The book also highlights how the sharp recession of 1920-21 ended with no bailouts and is an episode that seems to baffle Keynesians.
Rather amusingly, this has been a New York Times best seller, much to the chagrin, no doubt, of NYT columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman, needless to say, believes that the sort of massive government spending seen during WW2 helped end depression. To think that he actually won a Nobel. Oh, wait a minute…
The impending strike by Royal Mail workers is a wonderful opportunity to deal with a long standing issue… the essential obsolescence of the whole notion of state mail monopolies.
In this era of highly efficient competing international courier companies, why bother with state letter carriers at all? Do not ‘privatise’ the Royal Mail as was planned earlier, instead make the workers (very generously) redundant… all of them… then sell off the assets to the highest bidder, end the anachronistic monopoly on letter delivery and get the state out of that business completely: simply wind up the Royal Mail.
El Gordo needs to stop seeing this strike as a ‘problem’ and instead see it as a golden opportunity to raise some more money to squander from yet another asset sale whilst allowing modern high tech courier companies like TNT, DHL and UPS to expand into an area they should never have been excluded from in the first place… it is a win-win really.
CNN is talking about something called ‘Blog Action Day‘, which describes itself as follows:
Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web.
Yet would anyone care to bet that when they say ‘social’ change (such as deciding to do something yourself, such as recycling your plastic bottles) a great many of the contributors are actually talking about ‘political’ change (using the collective means of coercion to force people under threat of violence to be more ‘green’).
Of course such folks are just following the well establish and rather Orwellian conflation of opposites used exemplified by socialism, which I have often argued is the most ironic use of human language ever – a system by which all social interactions are forcibly replaced by intermediating politically derived formulae.
Well I would like to dedicate a previous samizdata blog post to “change.org” and the Blog Action Day jamboree, called My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon footprint by the indispensable Michael Jennings, that one man global warming machine that we are privileged to have as a writer for our splendid blog.
Take a look at this short video featuring Bill Browder, founder of the investment firm Hermitage, who several years ago was suddenly denied entry into the former Soviet Union for the “crime” of asking awkward questions about various Russian firms he had invested in. As I say, this sudden refusal of entry came to light a few years ago, but for some reason the video got made recently, and has stirred up fresh controversy about Mr Browder, and his treatment. I hope he has got decent security and takes care of himself.
To be honest, whenever I have an off-the-record chat with any private banker strategist, hedge fund manager etc., they tell me the same thing: avoid Russia if you do not want the risk of having your wallet lifted, or worse. It is that bad now.
But then I consider how the bond-holders in the US auto industry got the shaft during the recent bailout of said as orchestrated by Mr Obama and his pro-union political allies. The abuse of property rights knows no national boundaries.
About two decades ago, I gave a talk to an audience that included some devout environmentalists. In one of my answers to one of these persons, I said that if a technological fix could be found for, say, the hole in the ozone layer (a big topic in those days), by e.g. sending a rocket up into the hole and shovelling ozone out into the hole, thereby mending it, that would mean that we could be a little more relaxed about causing the hole to get big in the first place. In general, I argued, technologically fixable problems are less of a worry than technologically unfixable ones.
It was if I had said that, on account of a new kind of metal cleaner recently invented, it had become less of a problem if people broke into churches and pissed on crucifixes. It was, I was told in shocked tones, the very idea that problems could be solved with technology that was at the heart of the evil that humanity was facing.
So, I have long understood that environmentalism is a religion, and that the purpose of proclaiming the existence of environmental problems is absolutely not that they should be fixed, but they should be instruments to accomplish the transformation of people and how they live from what people actually are and how they actually live, to … something else. Technological fixes are evil. The worst evil of all.
Which means that Dominic Lawson is entirely right to say that plausible technological fixes for the allegedly huge environmental problems that we allegedly face now will cause rage rather than rejoicing among all the true believers of the Church of Mother Earth. Technological fixes will deprive that church’s devotees of their excuse to bully the rest of us into living different and less – in their eyes – sinful lives.
Even so, I enjoyed reading Lawson’s piece, with its sensationally unequal comparison between how much the current measures now being put in place by the world’s politicians to solve the alleged enviro-crisis, which are calculatedly and deliberately very hurtful to the world economy, compared to how absurdly cheap such technological fixes might be.
The significance of the ideas Dominic Lawson reports on (which are among those contained in this book) lies not in their ingenuity or in their political relevance in any immediately imaginable near-future. It is their irreverence – their sacrilegiousness – that is significant.
There is a superb blog posting up today by Mr Eugenides, about Trafigura, and about Trafigura’s attempts to stop people voicing opinions about Trafigura. Trafigura? I know. Who are and what is Trafigura? Never heard of Trafigura? Well, if you hadn’t heard of Trafigura before this week, you have heard of Trafigura now. And you’ve certainly heard of Trafigura now. Says Mr Eugenides, in his blog posting about Trafigura and about the libel lawyers that Trafigura has unleashed:
One day these highly-remunerated libel lawyers are going to wake up and realise that they aren’t being paid in guineas any more and that, thanks to this thing called the Interwebs, they can’t shut down freedom of speech the way they used to in the old days.
Indeed. The story is that Trafigura recently hired Britain’s swankiest libel lawyers to tell the Guardian not to mention in the Guardian that Trafigura had been unflatteringly asked about in the House of Commons, by a Member of Parliament. You read that right. The Guardian may not report on the proceedings of the House of Commons. Trafigura has been doing allegedly bad things in Africa, it seems, and an MP asked about Trafigura, in the most supposedly public place in the land, but Trafigura want their name, Trafigura, not to be reported in this connection. To which end Trafigura’s libel lawyers have told the Guardian, in a libel lawyer way that you apparently have to obey, that Trafigura may not be mentioned in the Guardian. No Trafigura, Guardian.
Here is the question, about Trafigura, recycled by Guido, in which the word Trafigura appears at the end, where its says: Trafigura. And thanks to Guido for linking to the Mr Eugenides piece about Trafigura. I would hate to have missed Mr Eugenides’s piece, about Trafigura. → Continue reading: Trafigura
I would be willing to wager that the Nobel represented the time when, in retrospect, it started to go really wrong for Mr Obama. He could have come across all modest and statesmanlike and told the Nobel prize givers that their award was very touching, very nice, etc, etc, but he just did not feel he had done enough to receive it, and there were more deserving recipients. To have done that, of course, would have been to demonstrate a capacity for embarrassment, for shame. Now Mr Obama has shown us that he has no such shame, that his vanity is as bad as it appears to be from this end. And that will be his downfall.
Even some folk over at that haven of idiocy, the Huffington Post, are not greatly impressed by what happened last week. Michael Moore, of course, is. With friends like these…
I repeatedly read non-atheists saying that atheists are foolish in various ways. Strident, arrogant, irrational, even unscientific. I obviously read a better class of atheist because I seldom see this, but today I did come across a foolish piece in which atheist Paul Fidalgo tries to accuse Tony Blair of saying, in a recent speech at a Georgetown University get together of Muslim and Christian scholars, that atheists are terrorists.
I say “tries”, because Fidalgo himself admits that he was obliged to remove the word “equates” from his first version of the title, and replace it with “groups”. In other words to admit that he had failed in what he was trying to argue.
This article originally used the word “equates” in the headline, which I have changed to “groups.” Realizing that Blair never specifically makes a perfect equivalency between atheism and religious violence, I thought this was a fairer word to use.
But instead of admitting that his argument is holed below the water-line, Fidalgo leaves it there, accusing Blair of wanting to say or trying to imply, blah blah, what he never did say, and actually never even tried to say. → Continue reading: Siding with Tony Blair against his atheist critic
Britain’s National Health Service, so beloved by Michael Moore, is not what (most) supporters of Obama’s ‘reforms’ claim they want for the USA. They are of course lying through their teeth as a single payer system is clearly the desired endpoint (i.e. eventual de facto nationalisation) and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
Well just look what you have to look forward to.
Yet as every UK politician will say when asked, the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’ and wanting to do away with it is clearly a sign of madness as the only imaginable alternate to state provided healthcare is, apparently, no healthcare at all, with anyone who is not a millionaire dying in the streets if they get ill.
Seriously, try and have a sober conversation about the NHS and the extent to which people have been propagandised will stun you.
Much has been written about Kindle in the last few days, but I for one am in no hurry to rush out and buy one.
I do like the idea of a searchable digital book reader, but being locked into a proprietary format, not to mention paying a 40% premium for content for not being in the USA, means I am not even considering this product.
If someone comes up with a well designed open-standards digital reader which does not force me to buy from Amazon, that will get me to look again, but until that happens…
More good sense on the current economic difficulties.
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it
– Terry Pratchett
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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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