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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This gloomy Bloomberg article, talking of capitalism’s global “winter of discontent”, argues that the current troubles are the first globalized crisis for free enterprise. Well, when an article makes an error in the first paragraph it does rather dim one’s enthusiasm for reading on. Arguably, we have had cross-border crises in markets dozens of times: the recession of 1870s, the Great Crash of the 1930s, the 1970s oil-shocks and stagflations in the US and UK, the early recession of the 1990s in countries as different as far apart as Japan, UK, Germany and US, etc. Maybe the sheer extent of the malaise now is what has struck the Bloomberg writer, but truth be told I think this is a matter of degree. According to this excellent book, markets were in fact more globalised 100 years ago than they are now.
To use one of my least favourite words, there is now a constant “narrative” as to how the recent turmoil somehow proves that unregulated capitalism has failed and too closely interlinked. Quite how anyone can, with a straight face, argue that financial markets have been unregulated in recent years is a joke. Here are some of the regulations financiers have been dealing with, often with counter-productive results:
- Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (known snappily as MiFID). This is designed to make EU financial markets more competitive, but as so often is the case, has been designed to raise barriers to entry in certain fields and has led to a rise in regulatory costs and loss of choice.
- Basel II bank capital adequacy rules. How’s that working for ya?
- Patriot Act – the finance provisions
- Various anti-money laundering laws
- Tax information sharing treaties (various)
- UK capital adequacy regulations of financial advisers
- UK laws banning/controlling certain types of financial advertising. Apparently, we poor saps need protecting from crooks. Shame none of the big banks spotted Bernard Madoff then.
- Restrictions on sell-side analyst research. This is built on the quaint idea that analysts working for banks should be models of Corinthian virtue and not have a bias.
- Sarbanes-Oxley accounting laws – these have been a disaster, encouraging a flight of US businesses offshore, killing IPOs and squeezing new business formation.
- And last but not least: central banks. These are state institutions, issue monopoly money and have been behind much of the current trouble. Sometimes, when reading criticisms of “unregulated” capitalism, you might imagine these banks are purely commercial entities.
I am scratching the surface and I am sure readers can come up with more rules and regulations. Every time any of you good readers hears this canard about “unregulated capitalism”, call them out gently for this and ask them in what field, apart perhaps from security or medicine, are activities more heavily regulated than finance?
Update: oh, I should have mentioned the US federal housing agencies such as Freddie Mac, and their contribution to creating a massive moral hazard problem in the house lending market.
The splendiferous Doc Searls has an alarming article about an outfit called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium.
Global Internet Freedom Consortium sell tools to break the Great Internet Wall of China. Cool. They also sell the private details of their clients who have purchased these tools to ‘vetted’ companies for ‘personalised advertising’. Extremely un-cool… catastrophically so if one of the ‘vetted’ companies turns out to be a front for the Chinese government.
I despise most internet ‘push marketers’ at the best of times (not only does it not really work, it is intensely annoying… those two points are not unrelated) but to sell that sort of client list to any third party is just all kinds of a bad idea.
These do not sound like people I would care to trust my liberty and quite possibly my life with if I was planning to most righteously dig a hole under the Great Internet Wall. I know two people in China who do exactly that on a regular basis and this article is probably the fastest way I have to let them know about the worm in the “Global Internet Freedom Consortium’s” apple.
The moral of the story? Read the fine print when buying the tools you need to stick it to The Man… before you pull out that credit card.
Quite possibly the greatest video ever…
… the pure essence of speaking truth to power. This video has no sell-by date.
a tip of the kevlar battle-bowler to Clark Carter
A few days ago I was asked why I hold Dave Cameron in such utter contempt and I am sure that person soon regretted provoking such a lengthy invective filled rant from me. Well here is another example why he is a complete waste of space. In an article titled Tories ‘would wipe slate clean’, Dave Cameron promptly precedes to explain that far from wiping the slate clean, he represents philosophical continuity with the people he wishes to replace:
Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year – rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers. He warned voters not to expect an incoming Tory administration to slash public spending and cut taxes, saying: “That’s not what they should be thinking…
If ever there was an example of John McCain style “I am the Lesser Evil” politics, this is it.
…”They should be thinking this would be a responsible government that would make government live within its means, that would relieve some of the debt burden being piled up on our children.”
…he says blithely immediately after having promised to increase spending by £25 BILLION at a time when the economy is actually contracting. What sort of mathematics is ‘Dave’ using in which an increase in spending by the state whilst a decrease in economic activity is under way does not add more god damn debt to ‘our children’? He wants to strip money from productive sectors at the worst possible time and pass the debt on to future generations but we should vote for him because he wants to do this slightly less than the other guy? Are you starting to understand my transcendent loathing of the man yet?
And he is not even a clever politician as he has the example of what happened to John “I support the bailout” McCain when the half-witted Republicans ran a Big Government Statist against an Even Bigger Government Statist. Truly a waste of space and a pox on the party who tolerates him as leader.
And the Labour party response?
His proposals are economic madness – cutting training budgets, housing and transport investment plans and help for people to get jobs just at a time when they need it most.
It is like listening to two madmen arguing over how full an invisible jar of jam is… and each insisting that as the other cannot see what they see, they must be insane. The lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum.
Who would have thought it? Prince Harry is just a normal bloke in spite of the weird circumstances of his upbringing.
The News of the World said it had a video of the army lieutenant calling a colleague a “Paki” while pretending to make a phonecall to the Queen. […] During the faked call to the Queen, as the Commander in Chief of the British Army, the prince says, “Granny I’ve got to go, send my love to the Corgis and Grandpa.” He finishes saying: “I’ve got to go, got to go, bye. God Save You … yeah, that’s great.”
[…]
In a separate incident, Prince Harry is heard calling another officer cadet a “raghead”, the News of the World said. […] The statement continued: “Prince Harry used the term ‘raghead’ to mean Taleban or Iraqi insurgent.”
Sounds like a great guy to me. Sure, I am all for abominating racism like any other form of odious collectivism (like socialism for example, which is tyranny for all rather than just tyranny for certain racial groups), but this hypersensitivity to any politically incorrect use of language is really annoying. I know Pakistani people who use the word ‘Paki’ for Christ’s sake! And ‘raghead’? Kill the enemy by all means but lets not insult them, eh?
This is the comment I left on the BBC site:
Wow, you mean he actually speaks like the 90% of the population who are not members of the media/political class?
There is an outpouring of ‘good will’ towards Obama coming from the statist establishment on the so called ‘right’, whatever that means, in the USA, such as this fellow. These are exactly the sort of apparatchiks I have talking about before who are at the very heart of the Republican party’s problems. They may well be personable but now is the time for radicalisation and resistance, not conciliation and surrender.
Noting how specific Republicans react to the beatification, sorry I mean inauguration of Obama will be a useful guide to who ‘gets it’ and who does not… who is part of the problem rather than the solution. Of course the easy entries on the ‘kick the fools out’ list needs to start with the party worthies who actually thought it was even good politics, let alone good for the country, to run such a profoundly statist candidate like McCain against the most left wing Democrat since FDR. Even the most clueless of marketing men (and that is an industry more awash with cluelessness than most) understand the importance of product differentiation.
Feel free to use the comment section to stay who on the Big Government wing of the Republican Party most urgently needs to be given the boot so that the Republicans have any value at all as a worthwhile alternative. Of course I am well aware that the answer may be ‘kick out all of them’ but that is not a very useful observation. The current crisis is a golden opportunity to actually do some creative destruction that could yield interesting results in the years to come. If that possibility is not of interest to you, then you have nothing to add to this particular discussion.
From time to time people get distressed by what they read on blogs. And there is much to be disturbed about when swimming in the sea of opinions, frustrations and outpourings as anyone who’s gone wondering on the intertubes can attest.
But I digress. William Heath has had a rough moment online – he came across something that bugged him.
We love the blogosphere; it’s full of great ideas, insights and humour. The boring bits are dull, of course. But there’s a distinct part of it that bugs me. I think I call it the “Blogosphere of Hate”.
[…] This crystallised in my mind when I got drawn (via the Spy Blog I think) to someone called “Not a Sheep” who’d written a post about New Labour and immigration. The post turns into a laundry list of people and things that non-sheep hates.
That’s it. That’s what bugs me. I’m not interested in the things people hate, and I dont think we have much to learn from people who are motivated by hate.
A commendable sentiment and perhaps I would be a better person if I could say the same about my feelings about some issues and people. I must admit my blogging started out of frustration and overwhelming hatred of what I have seen happening in politics. As the venerable Instapundit says about blogging: It beats shouting at TV.
There were no lofty visions of learning from or educating others. At the very start, it was simply a pressure valve, a pub rant (or cafe debate if you are a continental) spilling out into the cyberspace. Of course, I would like to think that things have evolved since then but for the purposes of this post, blogging certainly was not great busyness (to unkindly bastardise the Quaker principle William quotes in his post).
So let me count the ways… there are (types of) people I hate, not just institutions – for start all the communists, also those who consider socialism anything but a collectivist life-and-soul-destroying dystopia, I hate people who wear t-shirts with pictures of mass murderers such as Che or with symbols of evil a la red star or hammer & sickle. Oh and I hate most politicians as a self-selected group of people who routinely encroach on everyone’s autonomy and mess things up along the way.
Yes, hate is a strong word and I should use it with caution. However, I insist that there are times when it is appropriate.
Finally, I do not see the blogosphere as a place (‘bookosphere’, ’emailosphere’ anyone?), it is people talking, communicating, publishing, distributing, lazying about, wasting time, creating, connecting, saying great things etc. Just like most human activity, it can be seemingly or genuinely wasteful. Out of that, blobs of real value float up to the top. Occasionally.
That reminds me, I especially hate people, and there is plenty of them around, who try to impose their order or standards on all this, wanting to ‘keep‘ just the good bits, and ‘protect‘ us from the bad ones. It just don’t work like that.
Take a look at this, and scroll down for some of the comments. I still occasionally come across the sort of comments in the vein of “would it not be a good idea to stick all those yobs in the Army/whatever or make them do unpaid work?” etc, etc. These comments come up when there is a discussion about problems of our terrible young people. And this seems to be a viewpoint that transcends the usual left/right political divide: conservatives like the “get em sorted out” mindset while the left goes more for the “building a sense of community” approach. As usual, the notion that individuals are entitled to live their lives for their own sakes gets lost. I mean, that is just so damned selfish.
The issue is quite simple: if the problem is youngsters getting bored and into trouble, then the obvious solution is paid work, hence removing all the legal and tax barriers to said, such as minimum wage laws, restrictions on hiring teenagers, and so on. Acquiring the pride of getting a paycheque strikes me as far more useful in encouraging positive behaviours than some sort of conscription plan for young adults, as seems to be on the cards in the US.
And I’ll repeat my point that it is not enough just to speak out against plans to conscript 18 to 25-year-olds, for example. Proposals to make people attend schools (or whatever euphemistic words for such places exist) until they are 18, for example, is also wrong, and in many cases, counterproductive, particularly where non-academic youngsters disrupt the teaching of their fellows because they are bored senseless. Far better to encourage apprenticeships, with things like tax breaks, than keeping them in one damned education project after another.
If this idea of a young civilian corps in the US becomes fact, I wonder how many of all those young Obama fans will became disenchanted with him? But then I recall that Mr McCain, his vanquished opponent, was pretty keen on all this service stuff as well.
Fraser Nelson over at Coffee House picks up on a point that has been obvious to yours truly for a while as well: the dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, nicely charts the sort of demented statist economics that we are seeing back in fashion now. Rand’s novel is more than 50 years’ old and it focuses on the railroad industry, but its themes apply just as well to the world of modern banking or the internet.
Even if you decide to skip the enormous John Galt speech at the end of the 1950s novel, reading this book will help clarify a lot of the issues now swirling around. I can think of a few people in public life today who would qualify as the villains. Who, however, are the heroes? Where are the Dagny Taggarts, Hank Reardens or Francisco D’Anconas of today? There are mutterings about the book being made into a movie, starring the likes of Angelina Jolie (who is actually a lot smarter than some of her Hollywood peers), but I am not sure what the situation is with that. Hmm, let me speculate on the glory of an anti-statist movie winning an Oscar.
As a side observation, I cannot help but notice that ever since the UK government nationalised banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns Coutts, the private bank, there have been worries that wealthy clients of Coutts must be a bit nervous about having their finances run by folk beholden to the state. Indeed, as Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds might say. Those banks which have by luck or deliberate choice avoided state bailouts will benefit.
Via the indispensable Bishop Hill blog, is this scary Henry Porter article about how many Britons, including professional photographers, are being arrested for taking photos of supposedly “off-limits” buildings. I also notice in the article that yet another Tory MP has been arrested.
The police seem to be developing quite a taste for arresting MPs on dubious charges these days. But at least some judges are beginning to tighten the screws on coppers demanding to arrest or search people in “high profile” cases. But what about the rest of us plebs?
Daniel Finkelstein says what needs to be said. Brilliant article.
Following on from my post earlier about what sort of things might be regarded as wrong or intolerable by future generations that are widely done now, this book by David Friedman (son of Milton F), which looks at potential future legal, scientific and ethical controversies, looks interesting. For instance, Friedman asks what might happen to inheritance wrangles where the “deceased” is in fact held in cryonic suspension and hence not technically dead, as might be defined in a specific legal code. Some of this stuff might appear pure science fiction, but SF has a way of sometimes becoming reality. After all, the very fact that many people can afford to not use animal products such as leather has been made possible by synthetic fibres and materials such as plastic, something that did not exist about 100 years ago. Other developments could also make certain moral controversies either irrelevant or shift the boundaries markedly, or raise controversies that no-one has to contend with now.
On the dystopian side, the developments going on in IT might raise such worries about how the state might try to do things like implant computer chips into people’s bodies as a sort of ID system. Only the innocent have anything to fear…
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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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