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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This article in the Independent articulates an argument that I summarise thus: North Korea is developing nukes, it is firing rockets and other stuff into the sky near or above its neighbours, but the country is a basket case; it is led by a nutcase and all this stuff is in fact it is a sign of weakness, not strength. In other words, nothing much to worry about, please move along, ManU are playing Barcelona in the Champions League, etc.
I actually accept that there is probably a great deal of truth in this “nothing to get overly worried about” line. There’d better be. There is not much, short of war, with all the terrible costs it would bring, that neighbouring countries such as South Korea, China or Japan can do to pressure North Korea that they have not done already. (Japan, by the way, has been busily expanding its naval forces). When in the past I have briefly mentioned North Korea, some commentators on Samizdata will point out that the West (ie, the US), should not, or has no need or business, to defend South Korea or indeed to act as if North Korea is a “problem” to be fixed. Let the locals sort it out, etc. Well up to a point, but there will be wider effects to think about if nuclear weapons are ever used, or threatened to be used, against what is, after all, a broadly free and friendly country like South Korea.
I think part of the problem is that as long as the US has kept significant armed forces in the region, it can create a sort of moral hazard problem, in that the countries thus protected fall out of the habit of learning to defend themselves, or understand its costs. I am not an expert on South Korean public opinion, but I cannot help but wonder what the impact of a long-running US presence will have on creating a possible false sense of security. One of the things that is clearly coming out of the current economic crisis, and the wrecked state of US public finances, is that there will now be enormous pressure on any US administration, even one led by more hawkish people than Mr Obama, to cut, or just limit, defence spending. South Korea has not escaped the impact of the credit crunch, and if it was not willing to shell out more money on defence five years ago, it is hard to see it doing that now, unless it is completely terrified of an attack. I am sure that the top brass in North Korea understand all this only too well.
Let us hope it is a sign of a weak, not strong regime. But remember also that weak, or desperate countries can do desperate things, such as the Argentine Junta’s decision to invade the Falkland Islands in 1982. As we know, Argentina lost that conflict, and it helped destroy the regime. But Argentina did not have, or threaten to use, nukes.
“There is an almost universal assumption that the next government, of whatever stripe, will be imposing new taxes to avoid a junk-bond future. This easy option should not be allowed to run its course without challenge, because it ignores the risk of turning Britain into a junk economy of high taxes and low growth. It is no coincidence that the pressure to bring tax havens to heel has become intense over the past six months. So panicked were the finance ministers of the G20 nations about the risk of capital flight from the grabbing State that a campaign of bullying was launched against a small group of nations that refuse to accept that the State has the power to achieve absolute dominion over private wealth.”
Carl Mortished. He is writing about California, and the lessons of that indebted US state for the euro zone and Britain.
How has the current Western political class come into being?
What economic, social, historical, cultural, technological or other factors have contributed to its growth and ascendancy?
As I was saying before, the real poison of the MPs allowances system is not that they get ‘free money’. It is that it insulates them personally from the bulllying of officialdom that they would have the power, had they the motivation, to curtail. The Guardian reports:
A Labour source said: “The fees office green book which sets out the rules and advice on behalf of the parliamentary authorities states specifically that professional advice, for example from accountants or solicitors, is an allowable expense.
“In order that MPs comply fully with all the relevant requirements relating to tax, and to ensure they are properly meeting all their tax liabilities, many rightly seek professional assistance and advice where this relates specifically to their role as members of parliament.”
But,
Under tax rules, most workers are not allowed to claim the cost of paying an accountant to help them to fill in a tax return as a legitimate business expense.
HMRC is deliberately discouraging ordinary people from getting professional help with a complicated and secretive tax system by disallowing personal accountancy as an expense.* That is calculated to keep a naive segment of the taxpaying public on the margin in subjection and overpaying. In my experience an accountant is not expensive. The psychological pain he protects you from is at least as important as the financial benefit of getting it right.
The sums they claim for it are trivial, but that MPs are encouraged to get that analgesia (100% free to them), whereas the ordinary voter is discouraged from it (paying out of their own pocket, with at best 40% counting against the tax they pay, if they fall into the category where accountancy is allowed as an expense, which they won’t find out unless they employ an accountant in the first place), is another corrupting influence.
…..
* My idea of ‘tax justice’, unlike that of the various organisations that campaign for people to pay as much tax as possible and for more arbitrary power for the authorities, is one in which the system is transparent, there aren’t different sets of rules for different people, and the rules themselves are fair and set out in law.
…..
BTW, on the subject of tax, readers might enjoy this letter in The Times.
Well, it is finally official. Astronaut Charles Bolden is the new NASA Administrator. If that were the only news then I would not be writing about it. What does interest me is that a woman who has worked towards this nearly her entire life has snatched the Deputy Director slot and I wish to publicly congratulate Lori Garver, a very old and dear friend on her success.
Ad Astra Lori!
PS: Now I have to find out what jobs George Whitesides and Alan Ladwig are getting. I have worked with George for the last 5 years and know Alan from back to the early eighties. I should be seeing them at the ISDC in Orlando in a couple days.
Deutsche Welle reports:
New information indicates that the killer in the controversial shooting of student protester Benno Ohnesorg in Berlin in 1967 was a West German policeman who was also working for the East German Stasi secret police.
Sifting through reams of old files from the communist state security apparatus in East Germany, two historians, Helmut Mueller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jabs, say they accidently uncovered information that the policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a so-called unofficial employee of the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS) and a member of the country’s Socialist Unity Party (SED).
According to Der Spiegel,
It was one of the most important events leading up to the wave of radical left-wing violence which washed over West Germany in the 1970s.
Deutsche Welle asks the obvious question:
What would have happened to the German student protest movement of the late 1960s had people known that Ohnesorg’s killer had been a spy for communist East Germany?
My question is, what happens to the group memory of the German Left now that people do know that one of its iconic moments was not all it seemed to be – was in fact the opposite of what it seemed to be?
Perhaps not much. Since the Stasi files were opened there have been plenty of revelations. But that works both ways: the steady drip, drip has worn away the stone of the German Left’s own perception of its history. This resonates with me despite the fact that I did not know who the unfortunate Benno Ohnesorg was. I may have been precocious as a young leftwinger in the 1970s but not even my precocity extended to knowing the names of demonstrators killed by West German police brutality (as it seemed) when I was three years old. But though I might not have known about him, I knew – or thought I knew – there were many like him, all over the world. I knew that those better informed than I, the sort of admirable people whose book-lined shelves showed as background to their talking heads on BBC2, they knew about all such victims. Only it turns out that in this case they did not know the whole story.
I wonder if this revelation will have a similar effect on Germans of a certain age and intellectual profile as the revelation that members of CND such as Vic Allen really were Soviet spies had on me?
(ADDED LATER) Forgive me for coming back to a post after pressing “publish”, but I realise the line above gives the wrong impression, and there is more I want to say. The effect of the revelation that what the right wing press had hinted about CND – that it had been infiltrated – was the truth did not astound me. I had already changed my allegiance. If anything, it made me laugh. Well waddya know: the very thing that I clearly remembered thinking was a smear so ridiculous that not even the Torygraph smearers could really believe it, turns out to be a fact. But that laugh was my last laugh against my old self. From then on I thought of my former self as having been not just misguided but fooled.
“I think in the U.S. and in most of the world the public understanding of economics is abysmal. But it’s one thing not to understand something. I don’t understand brain surgery. It’s another to want to form policies on things on which you are ignorant. I hear the wonderful phrase “I want to make a difference” when it comes to policy. I would be horrified if I wanted to make a difference in brain surgery. The only difference is more people would die on the operating table. The only encouraging thing about public reaction to the crisis is that going by polls citizens seem to have more misgivings about some of these policies than politicians or the media. Still, though there have been studies that indicate the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by years, what is also clear is it was enormously popular. FDR was elected four straight times, and more than once without ever having brought unemployment down to single digits. An economic disaster does not necessarily mean a political disaster. If we could raise the average level of understanding of economics to what Alfred Marshall had in 1890, the vast majority of politicians would be voted out of office.”
Thomas Sowell, interviewed in Reason magazine.
“The readiness of politicians to relinquish power amazes me…..Take the European constitution, now rebranded as the Lisbon treaty. I read all the drafts of that document, spoke to lawyers and became convinced that its calculated opacity was a charter for the creeping takeover of national policy by bureaucrats and judges. There were brilliant MPs who could debate every inch of the detail – David Miliband, Gisela Stuart, David Heathcoat-Amory, Chris Huhne. But I met others who hadn’t even read the document and looked incredulous that I had. When the annual EU membership fee is £6.5 billion, when EU directives have driven almost half of the regulations passed here since 1998, and when implementing those regulations has cost £106 billion (according to a recent study by Open Europe), it is not surprising that people ask what MPs are doing.”
Camilla Cavendish.
As she points out in an excellent Times column, the contempt many of us feel for MPs is not just driven by their corruption. It is far more serious than that. It is that a group of people, either through apathy, venality, EU fanaticism or blind cowardice, have decided that they need to transfer powers away from the traditional cockpit of British politics. MPs are admitting they have little point other than to vote on minor, parish-pump matters. In which case, there is little case for paying them more than a local town councillor, or paying them anything at all.
The Times has a pretty good editorial on reforms that are needed. I have my quibbles, but it is generally on the right track. My main point of disagreement, however, is that none of the changes will significantly alter the balance between the state and the individual until the former is drastically reduced in size.
I love the headline on this piece in the Spectator by Matthew Lynn. I don’t think he is talking about our own Brian Micklethwait, but he could be.
Mr Lynn is talking about the risk, now rising, that the UK will have its sovereign debt ratings cut, a fact that means the UK government has to pay higher interest rates to investors wishing to hold UK gilts. I suspect the US could be headed for a similar fate.
Hopey-change!
Oh dear… seems the EU is being beastly to us again.
I wonder if I can buy brain futures or it is just pork bellies?
In the days when UFOs were big news, someone – as usual I have forgotten where I read this, but it might have been in something by Arthur C. Clarke – once put forward a very good reason not to believe that the US military were concealing alien visitations: “If there really were UFOs,” said a military man, “all us captains would be majors.”
And so they would. The proven existence of alien spaceships buzzing around in our atmosphere would prompt a vast expansion of the armed services. No doubt the governments of the world would also pour resources into the sciences. Administrators, too, would need more power and money in order to deal with the dramatic changes to our accustomed mode of life that might be necessary. The alien threat, scary though it would be, would be so good for so many people in receipt of a government salary that I am quite surprised that no one of any significance propagated it. In fact, according to believers in UFOs, the military-industrial complex went to great efforts to pooh-pooh the whole idea. Given the benefits it would have brought them, maybe I should revise my cynical views about bureaucrats.
That was then. This is now. These days the threat of global warming rather than flying saucers is good news for many people getting a government salary.
Some people will read this as meaning that I take climate change to be a group delusion, as UFOs were. Not so. I believe it is happening a little less strongly than I did in 2006 but I do not know. Back then I said, “The consensus convinces because there is no good reason to suppose that so many eminent scientists are lying or deceiving themselves when they say climate change is happening. But if you give me cause to believe that departure from the consensus gets a person ostracised, then there is a good reason.” I still think this, but I have become equally aware of another incentive for scientists to believe that global warming is happening.
Via Tim Blair and Benny Peiser comes a beautiful example of how the words “climate change” have come to be seen as the key to the government strongbox.
In the Guardian, Tariq Tahir asks:
“Changing behaviour will be as vital as new technologies in tackling climate change. So where is the funding for linguists, anthropologists and sociologists?”
The red things you see everywhere are tongues hanging out.
“If we were asked as institutions to help solve major global challenges, and asked what is the ‘dream team’ that we would want to field for doing that,” says Wellings, “as soon as you start to put that together, there are engineers, technocrats and very often people in the humanities and the social sciences.”
and
He points to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a member of the 1994 group. “I don’t know what the future of geopolitics is, but I do know that in the future we are going to have to turn to people such as those at Soas, who are experts in languages and anthropology from that part of the world. It will be an inevitable response that we will need a world-class centre of excellence of the sort that we already have there.”
In the meantime, Wellings, who is also vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, fears there will be less money for academics to engage in speculative research in social sciences and humanities.
and
Diane Berry, Reading University’s pro vice-chancellor for research, echoes this argument. “It is clearly important to protect funding for Stem subjects and medicine. However, we cannot afford to conceive our science base too narrowly – we must protect our wider research base.
“This is because addressing current and future global challenges depends on the successful interplay of all subjects. Furthermore, the boundaries between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities are becoming increasingly fluid as research at the frontiers of knowledge becomes increasingly inter- and multidisciplinary.”
The fact that people believe something because they have incentives to do so does not make their beliefs untrue. But it is a reason for caution.
There is a lot of stupidity about. To come up with examples from the world of politics would merely be depressing. In Act Two Scene Three of Macbeth the play takes a break from people murdering each other and Scotland descending into civil war so that a comic doorman can make lame jokes about brewer’s droop. In the spirit of that doorman, here are two wavelets in the world tsunami of stupidity that flowed my way recently:
Example 1: Barnado’s, the children’s charity, has put one of those collection bags through my door. The slogan on the envelope reads:
“We believe in children, do you?”
I would so like to say, “No, I’m a paedgnostic,” but that might be misunderstood. This slogan does not quite reach the heights of meaninglessness scaled by “Us needs you ’cause you’re Younique” that featured in the book Spacetime Donuts, but that was fictional and meant to be stupid.
Example 2: Several thousand of those things in which Barnardo’s so ardently believe took their Biology GCSEs today. One syllabus, extruded by Edexcel, is called 360Science. Yeah, without a space. No further evidence that it will be 360Stupid is really required, but in case anyone is wondering… a family informant swears that one of the questions on today’s paper featured a picture of a cat bearing the caption “This photograph shows a cat.”
What have you seen lately that is amusingly stupid?
UPDATE: to my mortifishameification I realise that “paedgnostic” would mean almost the opposite of what I meant. Consider it replaced with paedo-agnostic, which sounds even worse. Of course one could also tell the Barnardo’s collector that one takes either the weak or strong apaedist position.
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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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