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]
|
I am quite tempted to vote for Robespierre in the European elections, masquerading as Jean-Louis Pascual, a bus-driver who has lived in Reading for many years. Will he be asking, in monster mode, for cheese and wine orgies. Alas, no! His goals are more mundane: he wishes to become President of France. From 2006, since this competitor to Sarkozy has been around for a while:
The “Roman Party” is listed in the Evening Post as:
‘Jean-Louis Pascual, a bus driver who was born in France but has lived in this counrty for 11 years, explained the Roman Party referred to the phrase “When in Rome do as the Romans do”.
He said: “This is all about people coming to this country and becoming part of the community.
“There are some people who come here and stay separate, living in groups and keeping to their own culture.
“It is fine to keep in your own culture in your home, but outside it you should not be separate.”
Mr Pascual, 36, of Watlington Street, is standing for Reading Borough Council because he wants to be a “minister or president” in his own country.
He told the Evening Post: “I believe that if I get recognition in this country then I will be recognised in my own country. It is difficult to come to power in France if you are not wealthy.”
He said because he was single and without children and family here, he could not be corrupted.
He also suggests British jails should be moved abroad to Russia and the money saved should be spent on the NHS.
I rather prefer his criminal justice policy. Remember tomorrow is the day when you can stand up and be counted.
There is a certain kind of libertarian-stroke-free-marketeer intellectual whom I hold in particular esteem. I’m talking about the specialist consensus breaker. I gave a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society last year in which I mentioned two of my favourite intellectuals of this sort. I talked about James Tooley, who says: education for the poor doesn’t have to state funded and it’s better if it’s not. And I talked about Peter Bauer, who said: government to government foreign aid does more harm than good. I could also have mentioned another such consensus breaker: Terence Kealey.
Happily, my failure to inform the Oxford Libertarian Society of Terence Kealey’s existence and stature did not do any lasting damage, because by some means or another they still managed to hear about him. Better yet, they invited him to talk to them about the consensus he has been busy breaking, the consensus that says that science is a public good which has to be government funded. Kealey says: not so. As with education for the poor, it’s better for science if the government doesn’t fund it. And even better yet, the Oxford Libertarians filmed Kealey’s talk.
The talk was given on May 22nd, and the video of it was posted on the Oxford Libertarian Society blog on the 23rd, so sorry for only just noticing it and mentioning it here. But this is not one of those arguments where a couple of weeks will make any difference. I’ve only watched about a third of it so far, but am confident about recommending all of it. The talk I gave to the OLS is here.
See also this recent Kealey book and this earlier one, both of which I have read all of and much enjoyed.
Two fun comments on this brief report of the resignation of Hazel Blears.
From “Simon George”:
There is a term in electrical engineering. It refers to a kind of power failure that instead of occurring instantly, can take a long time to occur. It plays havoc with equipment and is usually much more damaging that a normal blackout
It’s called a ‘brownout’.
And this little snippet from a spoof speech by HB, penned for her by “The Penguin” (10:56 am, worth reading in full):
“My politics has always been rooted in the belief that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary expense claims, …”
I’m also dipping in and out of Prime Minister’s Questions, on the telly. It all illustrates what I more and more feel about how The Universe works, which is: that there are two kinds of questions. There are those that the questionee can ignore. And there are those that he finds he really must answer, because if he doesn’t answer them convincingly, something he is desperate to prevent will happen. Outside of Parliament, all kinds of questions are being asked of Gordon Brown, and not answered, and this now looks like costing him his job. But PMQs is a monument to the first kind of question. Brown is, it would appear, browning out, although I have learned the hard way not to state when the process will be completed. But you wouldn’t know it from watching PMQs.
My good friend in the US, Russell E. Whitaker, has plugged this excellent lecture in a Facebook posting (thanks Russell!). The lecture is delivered by the investor and commentator, Peter Schiff. It runs for one hour and 16 minutes, so you will want to find an appropriate time to brew up some coffee or pour your favourite tipple, relax and enjoy. He is an entertaining speaker, who makes the issues intelligible without dumbing down. He also has ideas on how to protect your money during the fallout.
It should be seen in conjunction with this book, by Thomas E. Woods, that I have mentioned a few times before. As these men observe, it is nonsense for policymakers like Gordon Brown, Alan Greenspan, etc, to blame what has happened on reckless private individuals, “greedy” Wall Street bankers, and so on. What happened was clearly predictable once one understands how incentives to save, borrow, invest and spend have been skewed by ultra-cheap central bank credit, the moral-hazard drivers of state regulations, bailouts, and the rest.
I rather liked Mr Schiff’s idea that Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi fraudster, is ideally qualified to run the US Treasury Department, given his er, skills.
Update: After queries, I put another link on as there appear to have been some problems with it the first time around.
I have said it before. I am trying to remember if I lacked the nerve to use the full obscenity last time, or whether an editor removed it.
Once again, though, I cheer the demise of a loathsome Home Secretary, but acknowledge that it will make little difference.
There was a time that I thought that Michael Howard was an unusually and unpleasantly illiberal Home Secretary. In truth, that was a fair estimate of the man, but I did not know what was to come.
At this rate, predictions that there will be a General Election in the UK by the end of this year look pretty credible. It may be that we will get a poll by the autumn, particularly if the meltdown of the government directly affects things like the UK’s debt credit rating. Another day, another bunch of Labour politicians head off.
There is a Reuters story quoting a survey suggesting that the recession could trigger a general increase in violence around the world. As is always important in these kind of claims, we need to be sure that correlation between two things – violence and economic uncertainty – is not being conflated with causation. Consider: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990s when the world, in general, was quite prosperous, albeit coming out of a short recession in countries such as the US and UK, when the price of oil had also been falling. The violence that broke out in the MEast later in parts of Africa (think Sudan, think USS Cole) took place in the middle to late-1990s, a period when emerging market economies were generally on the rise. The exceptions may prove the rule: what I think is true is that places that are felt, rightly or wrongly, to be unfairly excluded from a global prosperity are often likely to be unstable, and quite violent, but not always.
In fact, it is even arguable that greater prosperity might even cause some forms of violence if reactionary/religious groups regard such wealth as a defilement of whatever it is they want to protect. (I happen to think that explains why some anti-globalisation folk are often, in essence, reactionary snobs). That in part explains the argument of those who said that the West was attacked on 9/11 not for its supposed transgressions in the Middle East, but for its wealth and freedom per se.
Where I think economics does play a more direct role is where you have regimes that are financially busted, with few remaining resources, and where they greedily, and desperately, eye other, resource-rich nations nearby. That explains some, but not all, military campaigns. As in the case of Japan during the 1930s, a hunger for raw materials, coupled with a militaristic ruling ideology and elite, led to the Japanese conquests in parts of East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The same happened with Argentina and its invasion of the Falklands Islands in 1982 (the islands are supposedly close to some very big oil reserves). Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul had a partly economic incentive (all that gold, slaves, etc). And so on.
There may also be some evidence that the more prosperous we are, the more tolerant we are, too. In fact tolerance, which is allied to liberty, and prosperity, are faces of the same coin. In the minds of the great Victorian champions of free trade, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, free trade and peace went hand in hand. A bit naive, maybe – trade routes need to be protected against thieves and thugs – but it is a view based on an essentially benign view of how most of us live our lives, given half a chance.
The left should be sensitive to inequality, the left should never accept liberty on a playing field that is unequal.
– Conor Gearty. Quoted in this account of a debate on liberty at the Hay Festival by Afua Hirsch (do I detect an elegant lefty lawyer’s eyebrow raised in, “There was no competition for this position…”?).
Every time I hear Prof Gearty or another human rightist of his water argue for a policy with which I agree (banning torture, say, or permitting freedom of expression), I have to remind myself that they are proceeding from an entirely different foundation. The position is coherent, but coherently alien.
—-
* Well, last week, actually.
If you wondered why Formula 1 motor racing sometimes has all the excitement and crowd-pleasing qualities of a German art-house movie without subtitles, then Patrick Crozier will explain it to you here and here. I recall him making these and related points in a talk at Brian Micklethwait’s place a few years ago. Very interesting it was.
Even if you are not a sports fan or motoring enthusiast, the broader lessons of how a sport can regulate itself into narcolepsy are worth reflecting on.
Even in Britain, the headlines this morning are full of the imminent bankruptcy filing of GM. It is, as one report points out, the biggest bankruptcy in US industrial history, setting an unenviable record. Several things stand out as I looked through the details but one immediately grabbed my attention: the US taxpayer could be on the hook for up to $60 billion on account of state assistance. $60 billion. I guess we all get so punch-drunk with the vast sums involved in bank bailouts and the like that the significance of these sums becomes a little fuzzy (or maybe it was that white wine I had at the BBQ yesterday). $60 billion of money that is being spent to rescue part of a veteran auto firm will be money that will not be available to fund, say, a new set of business startups in the US. GM has highly recognisable brands and a lot of well organised workers. Pretty much everyone has heard of it, has heard of Detroit’s status as a car-making town. So, naturally, there is big media and political interest in what happens to GM. All those thousands of jobs on the line, etc. But the entrepreneurs, taxpayers and consumers who will see their wallets lifted, business plans stymied, or car purchases affected – who speaks for them? Taken as a whole, far more people will be affected by the cost of paying to sort out GM than the management and workers, but given the dynamics, it is usually far easier for politicians to portray themselves as “saving” a firm by spending or “investing” (sic) public money than it is to accept, however painfully, that a firm needs to be broken up and capital released for other, more productive things. (It needs to be remembered that GM’s problems pre-date the credit crunch).
The French classical liberal economist, Frederic Bastiat, wrote a famous essay, “What is seen and what is not seen”. He was attacking things like subsidies and tariffs. And not a word of his essay is out of date.
I am not a very musical person, but the following juxtaposition in the tv schedules last night struck me as remarkable:
9:30 ITV1 Britain’s Got Talent (results show). Amateur variety acts are ranked by the viewers. Predicted audience 14 million. An industry in itself.
9:00 BBC4 Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Documentary on the Funk Brothers, the Motown Records house band, who played on everything even the amusical like me have heard of, and incorporating live sets with the surviving old guys backing top modern soul artists. Predicted audience, way under half a million.
Hereford T-bone has none of the attractions of udderburger. And sometime in the next year they will let those 14 million vote for a government, too.
Bryan Appleyard, who writes a whimsical blog, likens the wondrous Barcelona FC forward Lionel Messi to the doomsterish intellectual, John Gray. I mean, what the f**k?
Considering how thoroughly Mr Gray has had the tar kicked out of him by this blog and a few others for his less-than-convincing opinions, I fail to see the connection. A certain trickiness, perhaps, a slipperyness? But in a footballer, trickiness in defeating a defender and goalkeeper is a skill to be admired. In Mr Gray, an ability to say six contradictory things before breakfast betokens a certain deficiency, a lack of rigour. But as Brian Micklethwait has pointed out, Gray is actually consistent – consistently pessimistic. He’s an Eyeore come rain or shine.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments