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.
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Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.
– ‘National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis – Outcome’, the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.
The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.
There have been a few clashes between Switzerland and the US, and to a certain extent, Britain, in recent months over the fact that centuries-old Swiss bank secrecy laws prevent Swiss-based banks from divulging information about their clients to foreign governments that suspect people to be evading taxes. Evasion is not a crime in Swiss law, contrasting with the Anglo-Saxon legal distinction between avoidance (which is broadly ok), and evasion (which isn’t). UBS, the Zurich-listed banking and wealth management giant, is currently embroiled in a case in the US in which the Department of Justice is demanding that the Swiss bank reveals details on up to 52,000 US clients. UBS is, so far, telling the American authorities to sod off. But the affair has cost UBS: the bank has stopped offering offshore banking to US clients and other non-US banks may also follow suit, or start to do so.
Meanwhile, countries such as Germany and the UK have been leaning on Switzerland to crack its secrecy laws, but that is not easy. To do so means that the Swiss electorate would have to approve primary domestic legislation and given that Swiss banks account for about 13 per cent of the country’s GDP, I can hardly see the Swiss voters, unless they are very stupid, throwing away one of their economic ace cards.
And I have defended tax havens several times before, for those who want to see why I take my position in the way I do. In summary: I consider what some countries are doing to be nothing less than an attempt to create a global tax cartel, with jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Singapore or Monaco in the position of non-cartelised competitors. But as we have seen in the case of OPEC in the 1990s, when the oil price was low, cartels crumble eventually. I cannot see countries such as India, China, Russia or Brazil shunning the opportunity to provide low-tax attractions to investors who become fed up at the larceny of their home governments. Even though some taxes – such as sales taxes and land taxes – are quite hard to dodge, I think it is a mark of an open, free world that people can migrate to jurisdictions where the taxes are to their liking, rather than have all their options cut off at source, which the cartelisers would do. Unfortunately, the drive against tax havens is too good an opportunity for the current transnational progressive class to miss.
Of course, the US has a tax haven called Delaware, and the UK has its numerous offshore dependencies, such as the Isle of Man, Jersey, British Virgin Islands and the Caymans. There is an element of cant to the stance taken by the likes of say, Barack Obama on this.
So, drawing all this together from a symbolic point of view, I hope Roger Federer, the debonair Swiss tennis genius, overcomes the boom-boom serving machine, Andy Roddick. No offence Andy – who seems a nice guy – but I want the dude from the mountains to win.
There is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this story, on how one UK government minister – seen as a potential future Labour leader – has announced, without telling Gordon Brown, that the case for compulsory ID cards has been scrapped.
Of course, the real issue remains that even without compulsory ID cards, we have a state database on every person in this country; and the aggregation of data about us gets more intensive, and is unlikely to be reversed regardless of the outcome of the next election. Too much money has been spent, too many corporate interests have been bought, for that to stop.
The end result of this incestuous relationship is the same as occurs whenever such closely related bodies become intimate – idiot children. Unfortunately, they’re running the country.
It’s like “Deliverance” without all the banjo music.
– Commenter ‘Veryretired‘
One of the same, government dependent, “private” credit rating agencies who rated mortgage backed securities as “Triple A” (because Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and the rest, were determined that reason would not stop the “affordable housing policy” and the lenders had to dump the crazy mortgages somehow – and, besides, Alan Greenspan Federal Reserve was backing up the building of a pyramid of debt upon them in spite of complaining about it from time to time) is now saying that there is no threat to the “Triple A” rating of United States government debt.
No doubt questions as to the soundness of this judgement about United States government debt will be met with the same response as such questions as “are you sure these people will pay back their mortgages” were. Namely a look of contempt saying “you are so simplistic, you do not understand the first elements of these complex matters – it does not even matter who the mortgages are to, the financial instruments that important people deal in are only distantly related to such basic things”.
However, please note the get out clause:
As long as the United States government takes action to reduce the national debt.
Both short term, “stimulus”, action and long term, health care “reform”, action is all about increasing the national debt. So when the house of cards finally collapses the credit rating agency will be able to say “What are you complaining about? We warned you!”
Thanks to our vigilant commentariat, I read this excellent, pithy demolition of central banking by Jamie Whyte, the banker and writer on philosophy and other subjects. Good on the Times (of London) for running it. It’s a healthy antidote to the flawed semi-Keynesian nonsense of Mr Kaletsky.
“When I stacked the shelves at my father’s grocery store, and I finished bringing the boxes up and emptying them and pricing everything, I wanted to see the shelves just sparkle. I called my dad over – I had a great father – he’d pat me on the back, “Fantastic!”
Ed Snider, American sports entrepreneur and philanthropist, from an interview with Stephen Hicks. This quote, I hope, gives some flavour of the zest and energy of a great, principled businessman who does not seek government handouts or favours. The interview is long but worth a read.
…says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.
Amusing comments.
A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was “getting better”, for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to “stimulate the economy”), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.
So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article (“editorial”) on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:
It starts with a lie – Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to “fix American health care”.
In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.
Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts…), but stressing some specific plan to “fix American health care” was not one of them.
Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.
“Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system” even for a magazine “as economically liberal as this one”.
This is a standard Economist trick – propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of “economically liberal”), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market – but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.
However, we are not “starting from scratch” so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations – facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile – it suggests five years. → Continue reading: The ‘Economist’ and American health care
There is a bit of a debate going on over at The Corner, the National Review’s group blog, on whether the 150-year sentence meted out to Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff is excessive. Well, given that the man is 71 years old, it is academic anyway since he will die in the slammer. But clearly, the length of the punishment is symbolic, though the judge could be accused of grandstanding – it might have been easier simply to sentence Mr Madoff to life imprisonment and have done with it.
From a philosophical point of view, I am not sure whether such a sentence has much of an effect in deterring future fraudsters; the trouble with the notion of restituting victims of crimes, however, is that what on earth can a convict like Madoff do to pay back his victims tens of billions of dollars? If he did some kind of work until he dropped dead, it would be unlikely that he could generate a fraction of the wealth that has been taken from people. In some cases, folks lost their entire life savings. Now the snarkier folk out there might say, well, his victims were all incredibly rich so they will not suffer, but that is nonsense. Theft is theft; if you have honestly built a fortune and some shyster takes the lot, that’s a crime, period.
But there is a problem with the idea of compensating victims when the size of a fraud is this huge. I’d be interested in what commenters think might be some practical solutions.
Some speculation is already generating about who might get the top job at the Institute of Economic Affairs, the think tank in the UK that is, in some ways, the grand-daddy of free market think tanks in the UK. John Blundell is going, having been in the post for some time. Guido has some rather barbed comments about Blundell. Guido mentions an old journalist friend of mine, Allister Heath, as a candidate. Allister would be great – but he is anyway going great guns at the financial paper, City AM, and may also have his eye on other journalistic positions in the future. But he would be a very strong choice for the role, although selfishly, I’d prefer it if those few of us who are libertarian journalists stayed in the profession.
In some ways – these things are not easy to measure – I get the impression that more focused groups such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance have been making far more of the running in recent years than the IEA, while the Adam Smith Institute has been doing a lot of outreach work with universities and colleges, which is vital. But the IEA has a tremendous pedigree and it ought to be a coveted position to go for. The only reservation is whether it can command enough of a budget to get in someone at the right level.
I rather like the recently-launched magazine of UK current affairs, Standpoint. This item on Ken Loach, the film-maker, is particularly good.
I wish the magazine success and it should give publications such as The Spectator, Prospect and The New Statesman a run for their money.
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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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