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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Well, full marks for trying, I guess. Ross Clark – a columnist whom I enjoy reading – argues that the fuss about proposals to reduce certain speed limits on UK roads are unwarranted. This is his argument:
It didn’t take long for the militant motorists’ lobby to get into gear to attack the Government’s proposal to reduce the national speed limit from 60mph to 50mph.
That’s true.
To lop 10 mph off the speed limit on country lanes, apparently, is tantamount to declaring a fascist dictatorship. “These corporate Nazi New Labour bastards are intent on turning law-abiding citizens into criminals,” began one of hundreds of angry posts on the website of a prominent motorists’ pressure group yesterday – before, bizarrely, imploring his fellow petrolheads to vote for the British National Party.
A classic bait and switch. For sure, some opponents of speed limits might like to clam they are the equivalent of bringing back the Gulag, but for most of us who do not see the logic of ever more draconian controls on the car, the case can be made without invoking images of Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany.
That the leaders of the motorists’ lobby are not quite the defenders of liberty they often profess to be is obvious from reading their output over the years. They have never been slow to demand the prosecution of cyclists, jaywalking pedestrians and motorists who drive too slowly or in any other fashion that impedes their progress.
That has probably something to do with the fact that a lot of pedestrians and cyclists do not think the highway codes in countries such as the UK applies to them. But he does make a fair point, but so what? Just because some motorists are hypocrits does not undermine the broader point.
Unfortunately, Mr Clark descends into nonsense:
The assertion that tighter motoring law is tantamount to dictatorship is further confused by a paradox. The world’s most illiberal regimes happen to have some of the most anarchic and dangerous of roads, while the most liberal nations tend to have the strictest traffic enforcement and safest roads. For all the conspiracy theories, Morgan Tsvangirai now says that the car crash that tragically killed his wife on Friday was an accident. It shouldn’t come as a surprise: reporters who have used the road between Harare and Beitbridge paint a terrifying picture of speeding, overloaded lorries and complete lawlessness – this in a country where if you criticise the President you can expect a rapid visit from Robert Mugabe’s thugs.
He’s right that consistently enforced rules of the road are hardly the same as political oppression, forced labour or torture. Of course. Rules of the road are a bit like etiquette: if consistently followed, it helps us all to rub along, which in a small island like the UK is not a trivial matter. But Mr Clark needs to think this through. Take countries such as post-war Germany or France, with their excellent motorways. Speed limits are, and can be, quicker than in the UK and in the case of Germany, some of their autobahns have had no limits at all (this may have changed, I’ll have to check). When that fella with the silly moustache was in power, the autobahns got built, and the quality of driving in Germany is, in my experience, high. But that example, when set against the chaos of Zimbabwe, proves little. In India, which is a democracy and fairly free place, the driving is absolutely terrible. There’s no correlation between oppression and driving like Jeremy Clarkson on crack. None.
Local authorities would love to reduce speed limits on a great number of roads, but they are hampered by bureaucracy. Whenever they want to designate a limit on a rural road lower than the default 60mph they must justify it through accident statistics. It may be obvious that motorists are driving too fast on a stretch of road, but a council must wait for the required number of people to be killed or injured before it can take any action. And even when, finally, sufficient coffins have been filled to justify a speed limit on a rural road, it remains legal to drive along surrounding lanes at 60mph, giving reckless motorists an incentive to divert on to even more dangerous rat-runs.
Well obviously, if we had privately owned roads, rather than roads run by bureaucrats, then speed limits would be dealt with without the need for all this sort of wrangling. This is, by the way, a powerful argument for privately owned roads.
The only problem is that the proposal does not go far enough. Many country roads are no more than cart tracks covered with tarmac, where 50mph is still far too fast.
Match the speed to the conditions – that is a sensible principle. But if that is the case, that does rather mess up the idea of blanket speed limits in the first place, unless one is going to adopt a sort of “if in doubt, walk” approach to getting from A to B.
And Mr Clark makes no reference whatever to the glaringly obvious fact that the profusion of speed cameras is, and has been, driven in part by a desire to raise revenue. Now, if roads were privately owned and the driver, as consumer, knowingly signs up to the deal, that would not be an infringement of liberty. But as things stand, the obsession with restricting use of the car is all of a broader assault on these machines, for ideological and environmentalist reasons. And the proposal to cut speed limits comes across, at a time like this, as just another, petty little squeeze on private citizens and their desire to get around relatively quickly. It has nothing to do with a yobbish desire to drive as fast as one likes and damn the results.
Notwithstanding traffic congestion – which private road ownership would help solve – the car is a symbol of freedom for millions. Mr Clark, who has written brilliantly about the assaults on freedoms in this country, should focus his ire elsewhere.
One of the recent themes of this blog’s authors has been to challenge, and hopefully demolish, the “narrative” of how the current crisis proves the weaknesses of “unregulated capitalism” (I could be far ruder than that but I am not a swearblogger). Another, related theme that we try to plug away at is to show how previous acts of interventionism, with politicians playing the role of strong hero on a big white horse, have failed or if they have “worked”, been by-products of massive state mobilisation for war.
Prime exhibit: the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When I was a child doing my O-Level history course in the early 1980s, I got this broad version: the New Deal demonstrated the success of Keynesian pump-priiming economics, therby proving also that support for fuddy-duddy things like the Gold Standard, or balanced budgets, or “sound money” was silly, reactionary and wrong. And some of my impressionable teenage brain agreed. I did rather sense that there was something fishy about this, but it was not until I was a bit older, and started reading all those wicked reactionary Austrians and Chicago economists that the issues began to clarify.
Recently, there have been moves by some writers to challenge the Roosevelt-As-Great-Man story more explicitly. One of the most recent examples is Amity Shlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man (borrowing her title from a famous essay by Willam Henry Sumner). And Jonathan Chait, a leftist writer for the New Republic, is angry at Ms Shlaes’ analysis. Reading his review, there are some points where I think he is being quite fair, but his article fails to deal with what I think is the most damning thing about FDR’s record during the 1930s, namely, that unemployment, according to official US data, never fell below double percentage figures right up until the outbreak of WW2. However one slices and dices it, that is an appalling record. Chait tries to claim that unemployment roughly fell by half, in percentage terms, during FDR’s period of office in the 1930s but that does not seem to be born out by the official statistics. Chait even tries to claim that FDR was not much of a consistent Keynesian anyway.
We then get this:
“Moreover, the classic right-wing critique fails to explain how the economy recovered at all. In one of his columns touting Shlaes, George Will observed that “the war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression.” Why, though, did the war defeat the Depression? Because it entailed a massive expansion of government spending. The Republicans who have been endlessly making the anti-stimulus case seem not to realize that, if you believe that the war ended the Depression, then you are a Keynesian.”
Well it is undoubtedly correct that unemployment did fall dramatically at this point. Well, for a start, it is not very difficult to achieve full employment if your country ends up, by a terrible turn of events, to be the sole economic power that has not been invaded or otherwise been bombed heavily. And Mr Chait completely ignores the rather important fact that a large chunk of the US male workforce was put into uniform. And yes, when the war was over, and with oil prices at rock bottom, the momentum the US had built during the war years continued. But remember, Mr Chait, that the US had a recession in the late 1950s and JFK, let it not be forgotten, cut taxes – they were implemented after his murder, in 1964. That was a supply-side measure, although not advertised as such, since the language adopted by Arthur Laffer and his school had not yet become common currency in US public affairs
But the broader point Mr Chait makes is troubling: is Mr Chait saying that what the world, or at least the US needs right now is the economic equivalent of a war, or of some massive, government-led direction of all economic activity, complete with rationing, forced service to the nation, etc? He needs to argue why it was that Britain, for instance, had managed arguably to recover quicker from the Great Crash than the US. By the late 1930s, Britain, at least in the south and east, was actually quite prosperous, although unemployment in the traditional industrialised regions was still bad.
Mr Chait makes a number of valid points about Shlaes’ book, which is not the most persuasive or rigorous demoltion job on Keyensianism that I have read. If you want to read such a book, this is a great place to start. And if one wants recent evidence of the problems with trying to reflate economies with cheap money, then the history of Japan over the last decade and a half is striking. Mr Chait will have a tough job trying to shrug that example off.
Following from my previous article about the alleged size of the role played by China/Asia in the current financial troubles, an eagle-eyed commenter by the name of Marc Sheffner pointed this excellent article out which clarifies a lot. My thanks to Mr Sheffner.
God but I love the internet.
Remember that email I got from Tim Evans flagging up this? Well someone called James Tyler responded to it, also sending his reply to all of us on Tim’s list, with a link to this, which I likewise recommend. It’s a piece in Portfolio.com called “The End of Wall Street”, by the guy who wrote Liar’s Poker. I’m still reading the piece, but this is my favourite bit so far, about the observations of a man called Eisner:
More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street. Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. “The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,” says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he’d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. “She was this lovely woman from Jamaica,” he says. “One day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I said, ‘How did that happen?'” It happened because after they bought the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one. Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the experiment. “By the time they were done,” Eisman says, “they owned five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn’t make any of the payments.”
Paragraphs like that make me optimistic that statists just will not be able to pass the catastrophe off as a mere failure of unregulated capitalism. Yes the whole Sub-Prime thing was aided and abetted by Wall Street, big time. But it was set in motion by Washington politicians, and in particular politicians of the Democrat persuasion. This was, as we cannot repeat too often, a failure of the mixed economy, not of the extreme free market of the sort we here favour.
The folly of the Republicans, which has already been electorally punished, deservedly, was that most of them didn’t see it all coming and panicked when it did, and those that did smell the coffee were unable to do anything to soften the blows when the coffee exploded, or whatever. My guess is that there will soon be a cull of Washington Democrats as soon as the voters next get a culling opportunity – two years from now, right? And the big question is, what will the new intake’s take be on it all? But, as I often say on my personal blog when discussing gadgetry of various kinds beyond my understanding, what do I know?
UPDATE: Although, I’ve now finished reading the piece, and it is clear that its author derives no such anti-statist moral from his wretched story. Wall Street is the villain, and Wall Street is being justly, although very insufficiently, punished. Not a word about Democrats, or for that matter Republicans.
Once every month until I get sick of it, I intend to remind anyone whose attention I can get of this…
PARTS of the United Kingdom have become so heavily dependent on government spending that the private sector is generating less than a third of the regional economy, a new analysis has found.
The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere…
The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.
It was the redoubtable Thaddeus Tremayne who first mentioned this back on January 25th of this year in an article called ‘Narrative narcosis’.
So next time some purblind fool tells you that our economic woes have been caused by ‘capitalism’ rather than ‘regulatory statism’ and ‘big government’, make a print out of that Times article on good high quality paper, roll it up tightly, and shove it very forcefully wherever your imagination and their complacency will allow.
Britain is to cut the speed limit from 60 mph to 50 mph on most roads to ‘save lives’. Does anyone seriously believe this is not in fact to raise more revenue from speeding tickets?
The solution is obvious. Break the law and smash the cameras. And when they replace them, smash them again. And again. And again. And again.
We are way way way past the point where words are enough. If you actually expect to make a difference, you better get used to the idea that this sort of ‘direct action’ is the only thing that will make any impact at all on the powers-that-be. Don’t believe me? Well do you think radical muslims in the UK and elsewhere could have eroded deeply entrenched ‘givens’ on free speech if their objections to any public criticism of their religion were not backed with explicit or implicit threats of actually real world violence? No, I do not like it either but that is where we now find ourselves, so get use to it. Be willing to pick up that brick and actually throw it or you are irrelevent. Push has come to shove.
It is said that pragmatism trumps ideology in a crisis. What actually happens in a crisis, certainly in this one, is that the ruling party gets to rechristen its ideology as pragmatism.
– Christopher Caldwell
He is talking about the Democrat’s addiction to protectionism. But it is happening all over, and not just with ruling parties, but with would-be ruling ones. The wicked world is disintegrating, and it is all the fault of an evil which whatever commentator you are reading especially hates, and offers a superb opportunity for the bees in his bonnet to rebuild the social honeycomb so that mankind can buzz happily in unison ever after.
I am reminded of the Trotskyist red-greens I met in the 80s, who had the merit of putting it very clearly. Unlike the merely conservation-minded, or deep-green nature-worshippers, they welcomed a predicted ecological collapse: chaos and mass-starvation would turn people to The Revolution out of desperation. A lot of those purveying their own patent medicines for the depression seem to be unconscious that they are engaged in the moral terrorism of the transitional demand.
Are you optimistic about the future? Several months ago I was not, but I am now. From what I can see, governments are walking down the path of their complete moral and financial bankruptcy far more quickly than I ever imagined they would. I thought that it would take our overmighty governments several slow, demoralising decades of decline and eventual collapse to completely discredit their authority and control in the eyes of the people. However, our governments appear to be going supernova right now and I suspect they will burn themselves out over a few painful and tumultuous years – destroying a great deal of wealth in the process, no doubt. However, as worrying as that prospect is, it was always going to be that way. And in spite of that, I feel particularly upbeat about the longer term future. Those who know nothing more (and expect nothing less) than widespread government authority and control over all aspects of our lives will have their imbecile – sorry, umbilical – cords to the State cut sooner than expected, thanks to the overwhelmingly reckless (but entirely predictable) government response to the current financial crisis. I really do believe that future historians will pinpoint this crisis as marking the beginning of the end of the big-government era.
Do you agree?
Government is an institution that has evolved along with we humans as our best means of applying violence. When you want to break things and kill people, there is no better institution for the job. The problem comes when we attempt to use it for other purposes. Its true skills will out even when the goal is entirely different, as with the current attempts of States to ‘help’ the economy.
What I see happening in the US and UK and other places with maximally ‘helpful’ governments is much like what happens when you accidentally spill Nitric Acid on the rug. It steams, bubbles, gets hots and makes a bit of sound and for a short while it appears that ‘something is happening’. Then the smoke clears and you see that it has ruined your rug.
Government ‘help’ is like that.
Regular commenter here Nick M takes a wack at Vernon Bogdanor:
Progress occurs when free people do things. It just happens Boggy. It is retarded when retards like you try and gerrymander it. In 1900 the fastest growing economy on the planet was Russia’s. Look at the plight of the place now? There is nothing “progressive” about being progressive.
I was going to put that up as a Samizdata quote of the day, but I reckon the feline enumerator has his sneer quotes around the wrong “progressive” there. Still, good stuff, albeit sweary.
Talking of which, I do wonder about this swear-blogging thing. The bad news is that respectable bloggers who might give particular (swear-)blog postings of merit lots of new readers are put off by the swearing from linking to such postings. (Telegraph Blogger Alex Singleton recently told me exactly this.) On the other hand, a lot of people are very angry just now, not just, you know, in a state of respectful disagreement with the powers that, for the time being, be. Such angry persons deserve voices around which to rally, voices which communicate their feelings rather than just their thoughts.
Swear-blogging may also mean that, by assembling all the angry ones in a cursing, seething internet mob, in a way that completely alienates our present version of Polite Society, the angry ones will achieve a far greater degree of tactical surprise come the storming of the Winter Palace, or whatever will be the equivalent event or events during the next few years. Polite Society just won’t see it coming, because it simply cannot now bear to look. It will consequently swing in far greater numbers from lamp-posts (or again, whatever will turn out to be the modern equivalent) than would otherwise have happened. Which just might be a rather fucking good thing.
“If you have a mortgage and are celebrating record low repayments, then enjoy it for now. Ask what the consequences will be for your household budget of interest rates of 10 per cent or higher, which will be needed to tame the rising prices that will result from this mad experiment. But there is another great British consensus emerging around the idea. “It is essential,” say analysts. “No other option,” sighs many a fiscal conservative. “Everyone” is in favour of it, we’re told. I have just about had enough of “everyone”. It was “everyone” – most economists, politicians, etc – who thought that the bubble would never burst. They were wrong then, and are now. “
Iain Martin, on the Bank of England’s descent into monetary madness. Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.
Following on from this, is another theme that came out of that seminar with media/City luminaries I went to the other day. One point that Anthony Hilton mentioned was the “global imbalance” issue. This is all about how the West, which is in net terms, up to its eyes in debt, has been living high on the hog thanks to oodles of surplus savings generated by countries such as China and Japan. In looking to figure out how to play the “global financial crisis blame game”, one argument goes like this: China, with its cheap exports, kept cheap by its artificially low and fixed exchange rate, earned huge amounts of money by selling this stuff to the West; in turn, the Chinese needed to reinvest the proceeds – there would be no point earning money you cannot spend – and they reinvested those proceeds in things like US government securities. As a result, long-term bond yields in the US fell, which enabled Mr and Mrs Westerner to renegotiate their long-term mortgages, release equity from their homes, and spend even more of their inflated wealth on – yes you guessed it – Chinese consumer goods. Result: a whacking great housing and consumer spending boom that inevitably crashed.
This argument sounds quite convincing. If it is true, then it also suggests that, contrary to what some of the critics of the Fed or other central banks might say, that there is not much that someone like Alan Greenspan could have actually done to curb domestic US monetary growth if there were such enormous inflows of hot money coming into the country’s debt markets from abroad. Well up to a point, Lord Copper. Much depends, I think, on what proportion of monetary growth in the West was driven by Asian inflows, and what was basically driven by domestic factors. I haven’t seen a lot of commentary on this.
If you buy the “Asian connection” argument, a problem, it seems to me, is that it would not have been realistic, for various reasons, for the US to have tried to curb these supposedly dangerous inflows of Asian money by protectionist measures such as capital controls or exchange controls. If one believes that capital and trade flows are good things, then imposing such controls would and could cause more damage than it solved. Exposure to capital flows has, in many ways, driven beneficial economic change.
But the argument about Asian money does suggest that had the Fed, etc, raised rates to curb inflationary pressures, all that would have achieved would have been to suck in even more Asian money from investors seeking a higher yield. But presumably, with higher rates, it would have curbed, and did eventually curb, US consumer spending, and hence dent the demand for Chinese and other non-US goods. China is now starting to feel the effects of the global slowdown rather sharply.
Even so, the “global imbalance” argument highlights the fact that in a world of fiat money without capital controls, it is now very hard for state central banks, even those with powers as wide as the Fed or the European Central Bank, to set interest rates effectively. Of course, the idea of a central bank setting rates for a complex economy is itself a version of state central planning. Globalisation has exposed its limitations.
One of the things I really want to ask Kevin Dowd at his Libertarian Alliance Chris R. Tame memorial lecture next week is how this sort of issue can be addressed. The “Asian dimension” to our current predicament could be the proverbial big gorilla in the living room. Or maybe it is just a small and rather distracting rodent.
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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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