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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I posted this item almost as Brian hit the button on his own entry on the same subject. But I think it is worth a second bite at this cherry.
Great work by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator for revealing that Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now almost totally owned by the UK government, has been asking prospective clients about their political affiliations. The exact term is to ask whether a wannabe client is a “politically exposed person”. Now, this maybe more of a cockup than a sign of anything more sinister, so my trigger finger may be getting unnecessarily twitchy, but still. This is, as the commenters on the article Fraser writes says, a classic demonstration of why state-owned banks are bad and ripe for corruption. Special favours will be demanded by the ruling party’s clients. In France, remember, the former state-run Credit Lyonnais bank was a sink of corruption.
RBS is also the parent of Coutts, the private bank, and RBS Coutts, the international version of said. These banks provide clients with offshore accounts. The risk is that such a bank could be put under political pressure to deliver details about its clients, a fact that becomes particularly relevant with so many governments currently trying to shut down so-called “tax havens” such as Switzerland.
If it is the case that RBS has been trying to prize out details of potential clients’ political affiliations, then at the very least the management responsible for this dim-witted idea should resign. In fact, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, should serious consider his own position. On his watch, the once very solid, in fact gloriously dull, UK banking group Lloyds has been pressured into buying the debt-laden UK banking group HBOS. Result: Lloyds’ share price has crashed and most of that bank is now owned by the government. (Full disclosure: I bank with Lloyds).
Unbelievable.
Fraser Nelson:
Some of the worst events in history take place because no one is really in charge. That RBS could blunder their way into this is almost as scary as the idea that they did it deliberately. I accept it was a blunder: God knows, RBS has made enough of them already. But the banking industry should urgently review and clarify the way it handles the issue of “politically exposed persons.” No one in this country should ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank.
Fine prose, I think you will agree. At first I had in mind to make that first sentence there into today’s SQOTD. But think about it. To Nelson, it is obvious that nobody should “ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank”. Excuse me? If I am wondering whether or not to lend you money, I will ask you any questions I feel like asking, and if I don’t like the answers, then it will be no deal. If you don’t like me asking such questions, you are free to look elsewhere for the funds you want to borrow, even if I say yes. If you don’t like a bank you lend money to asking such questions, then don’t lend it to them. I am talking about the right to discriminate, both by lenders and by borrowers. Discrimination is, or should be, at the heart of banking. The attempt to drive discrimination out of banking has been at the heart of our recent banking woes.
That Fraser Nelson, a man most definitely on our side in the broad loves-capitalist-success hates-socialist-slums way that we regularly here celebrate, should write something like that, with no apparent sense of self-contradiction, tells you just how debased – how nationalised – the state of banking already is now in Britain, and has been for some while. It’s not that Nelson favours state micro-management of banks in the deliberate manner which I do agree is suggested by my heading. It’s worse than that. He just takes it for granted. His only question is: how should it be done?
Because you see, what makes this question about whether you are a “politically exposed person” scary and Soviet, which is Nelson’s point, is that the banks already are nationalised, in the sense of their databases being, you know, like that (hands brought together into a combined, intertwined, two-handed prayer fist) with government databases.
If banks operated in a true free market, banks asking about politics, or for that matter being suspected of having (and in fact having) political preferences which they make a point of not asking about, would just be stuff discussed in Which Bank? magazine. And the readers of such magazines would have plenty of banks to choose between, just as they now have plenty of magazines to choose between.
Bloomberg carries this article today about the willingness of China to go on holding Western debt that might deteriorate in value:
China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is “worried” about its holdings of Treasuries and wants assurances that the investment is safe, Premier Wen Jiabao said.
“We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States,” Wen said at a press briefing in Beijing today after the annual meeting of the legislature. “I request the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets.”
Good luck with that. As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the fact that the US, or indeed the UK, might be downgraded in credit terms as nations or even default on certain debts, is no longer unthinkable. Defaults are not just things that happen in Ecuador, Russia, or competelyfuckedupistan. They can happen in the supposedly rock-solid financial centres of the world.
As Glenn Reynolds says sarcastically of the new US government of Mr Obama, the country is in the best possible hands.
Unless American politicians and bureaucrats wise up, there will be a second war with Mexico within a generation.
This is not hyperbole. Drug lords are taking over the border areas between the two countries. Killings are spreading into American cities in the southwest. Firefights near the border are becoming common. There have been kidnappings within the United States in which some of the perpetrators are thought to have not only been using military equipment, but may have been moonlighting Mexican police or military men.
Before you begin to vent your rage on Mexico, I would like you to ponder the source of the problem. This is not an ideological battle where the world vision of the enemy is independent of what we think or do. That is what we face in the Middle East. Our actions there may affect Islamist strategy and tactics, but not their dream. We are not the creators of that problem.
The problem in Mexico is an entirely capitalist one. There are goods which are in great demand. Those goods are profitable and over nearly four decades we have caused a vast global giga-billion dollar industry to come into existence where once there were college students smuggling trunks of grass over the border at Spring Break. That is also not hyperbole. One of the floors of a dorm next to mine did exactly that and supplied the entire CMU campus back in the 1969-71 era. Then came Nixon and ‘Operation Intercept’. And what was the great accomplishment of this at the time great expenditure of taxpayer money? Why, by the time I left grad school prices had doubled, tripled or more and nearly all the smuggling was in the hands of organized crime instead of paying the tuition, room and board of a few engineering students. Even so, enforcement at the time was a still a joke, and much laughed at even as it transitioned from “Berkeley to Boston Forty Brick Lost Bag Blues” to Cheech and Chong’s “Up In Smoke”.
So what did the moralizing Statists do? Admit their failure? Apply tax payer money to something useful? Of course not… they did what governments always do with failures. They increased the budget. When that failed utterly they increased it again. And again. And again. Meanwhile, Libertarians correctly predicted disaster after disaster, decade after decade. Drugs are money and all that it buys. We put drug entrepreneurs outside of our then liberal legal framework… so they adapted and operated by the old fashioned rules of Feudalism.
Feudalism is the name we gave to violent gangs far enough in the past that we can romanticize them as Princes, Princesses, Knights and the like. The rules of the Feudal game are simple. You murder your way to the top then you pillage your competitors and steal their land and resources. If you are a mean enough SOB you get to live a life of sybaritic luxury… until someone nastier and smarter and more underhanded comes along and cuts your throat.
Fifteen hundred years ago it came about due to the post-Roman power vacuum. In our era the power vacuum is in a parallel world and economy. It is outside of our laws and nation states, by our own hands, and it exists side by side with us at every point.
Every time we drive up the cost of doing business, the feudal lords of this parallel universe counter predictably. The government of the United States succeeds only in adding to their cost of doing business. You might imagine that would be a big thing… but Statists have probably increased the cost of doing legal business even more over those decades. The more regulation, the more laws, the more taxes, the more individuals will find the ‘other side’ preferable.
Twenty-five years ago US military men stated they wanted nothing to do with the War on Drugs. Getting involved in it would put their institution at risk of bribary and corruption. The moralistic morons in government would have none of it. The military was called upon to run interdictions at sea and in the air to find potential smugglers. They have been countered by minisubs, UAV’s, counter-radar and a whole range of technological counter-measures. Every escalation provides the income necessary for the counter-escalation.
We have arrived at a predictable state of affairs. Feudal lords are now taking over portions of ‘our’ universe in which they hold the balance of power. Border provinces in Mexico are under their control. Military resources are appearing in their hands. Soon their private gangs will morph into real armies. They will bribe American military men and politicians. Where bribery does not work, they will kidnap and kill children and rape wives as object lessons in what happens when you dare to disobey the new royalty.
A time will come when the Mexican National government is absorbed. What do you think is going to happen then? When Mexican Special Forces are carrying out hits against any American who gets in the way of business, things are going to get very, very ugly. There will be calls to invade our southern neighbor and reasonable people will then have to agree there is no other choice. If and when it comes to that, we will have absolutely no one but our leaders to blame. It will be 100% their fault for getting us there.
You can not stop contraband. You can only make smugglers rich and powerful enough to buy you out or kill you.
But the internet is a city and, like any great city, it has monumental libraries and theatres and museums and places in which you can learn and pick up information and there are facilities for you that are astounding – specialised museums, not just general ones.
But there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn’t want your children wandering alone …
And I think people must understand that about the internet – it is a new city, it’s a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don’t pull down London because it’s got a red light district.
That’s Stephen Fry talking, which I spotted here. This got posted at almost exactly the same time as the one below. Never mind. Both are worth having. And I am sure that Jon Coupal would agree that those wanting to castrate the internet make copious use of children to do it, just as others use children to boost their budgets.
Those in power in the Capitol – as well as many local politicians – make skillful use of those who rely on government services to advance their spending agenda. They use children, the disabled, the elderly and others who appear vulnerable to justify increasing taxes. When reasonable arguments are made that higher taxes in an already high-tax state could lead to fiscal ruin and less for everyone, politicians and bureaucrats use these dependent classes as human shields.
– Jon Coupal
(via John Beck)
Following on my from recent SQOTD about property rights, it seems poignant to link to this item by Roger Thornhill.
This issue is also related to that of compulsory purchase/eminent domain that I wrote about some time ago. It is also somewhat related to the idea that the government is entitled to take money out of “dormant” bank accounts if, after a certain period, the account-holder does not use the account. The assumption seems to be, that if in doubt, it belongs to the collective.
Well sod that, quite frankly.
I do not like all of Will Farrell’s movies. But this one, about a nutty US TV anchorman, is wonderful. I wonder if any actual broadcasters have ever dreamed of doing this? I bet Jeremy Paxman has.
It will of course not be the end of the Catholic Church, but the pattern of state regulatory encroachment here in what should simply be a criminal matter is unmistakable.
After a priest stole $1.4 million from a church in Darien, state legislators have proposed a law that would regulate how parishes are controlled and operated.
The state’s Catholic bishops rallied opposition from the pulpits at weekend Masses.
The law essentially would strip the dioceses of all financial control of parishes and leave bishops and priests to oversee “matters pertaining exclusively to religious tenets and practices.” A board of elected laypersons would handle parish finances.
Even if “lay control” (and what started with an “elected body of lay persons” would not end there – it is the principle that Church matters are governed by the government that they are after) was established the Roman Catholic Church would continue to operate in peaceful defiance of the government – as it did in France after the government take over (the “separation of Church and State” in the inverted language that is used by these evil people) of 1905.
This is the real reason that Obama and the other liberals are not popular with either conservative Protestants or Jews or with Roman Catholics – whereas FDR was. FDR, however far his economic radicalism went, was a social conservative – government control of churches would not have even occurred to him. The left think they can use scandals, both financial and sexual, to aid their objective of taking over (i.e. destroying) all institutions outside government.
They are mistaken. Even if there is no God – it is the independence of these institutions from government that gives them value in the minds of those who are involved in them. They will be deeply offended in ways the left do not understand.
(via Red State)
“The trouble is that because schools fail to teach history, especially legal and constitutional history, the vast majority of today’s citizens have no inkling to what they owe their liberty and prosperity, namely a long and successful struggle for the rights of which the right to property is the most fundamental. They are therefore unaware what debilitating effect the restrictions on property rights wil, over the long run, have on their lives.”
– Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, page 291.
Of course, by property, one does not just mean physical property, but also to the whole idea that individuals, not the state, own their lives.
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.
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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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