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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At 8 pm on Friday 14th, the day after tomorrow, I am giving a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society, as mentioned here. I killed two birds with one stone by listening this evening to a talk given on October 24th to the Society by Professor David Friedman, concerning which they have a report (and a link to the recording) on their blog, here. I wanted to hear what Professor Friedman had to say because I always want to hear what he says, he having been one of my favourite libertarians ever since I first read The Machinery of Freedom in about 1975. And, by listening to what Friedman said to the Oxford Libertarians and to the questions they asked of him after he had spoken, I now have a better idea of what kind of audience they will be and what they’ve recently been attending to and thinking about. More recently, their blog flagged up their video of the same event. I’ll be watching some of that too.
Today, they put up a blog posting advertising my talk. Its heading is a little out of date, but it describes what I used to do far more energetically than I do now, and what I will be talking about: Propagandising for Liberty. My use of the word propaganda is deliberate in this connection. For me, propaganda is a neutral term, meaning simply: that which should be propagated. But there is, I agree, a whiff of intimidation about the word, of weight of argument in the gross tonnage sense as well as merely in the sense of intellectual power. But how to contrive such effects without incurring crippling costs? I don’t have all the answers, but will offer some and I will be paying particular attention to universities.
By the way, David Friedman’s talk to the LA/LI conference on the afternoon following his Oxford talk, on the impact of various revolutionary near-future technologies, can now be viewed as well as heard, here.
“Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.”
Mark Steyn. As he points out, the upcoming US government bailout of General Motors and god-knows-what-else should nail the idea that the US is the land of “unregulated capitalism”.
Update: PJ O’Rourke writes in similar vein.
Simon Heffer concludes this Telegraph piece about why there must be public spending cuts, despite the public statements of all the political parties which by omission suggest the contrary, with this:
Having just witnessed the American election, I am aware of one other point. In the run-up to elections, people say absurd things about the economy to garner votes. Barack Obama has made $1.3 trillion of spending promises. He will shortly have a rendezvous with reality. He will not deliver on those promises. He will instead have to preside over a financial situation whose full horror we have yet to see here. Wiser and older heads in his administration will need a plan to deal with reality, even though one was not promised during his campaign.
This is what we need here. An early election – which Mr Brown might as well call, since the Tories have been found out and are slipping back in the polls – would at least get all the lies and idiocies out of the way. One party would then have to confront reality, just as Mr Obama is about to have to do. Then we could end the pretence of a pain-free recession, and get on and take it. So long as our politicians feel they must butter us up and make out that what is to come won’t hurt a bit, the only way is down.
All the lies and idiocies? That would be asking too much. But you can see what he means. My first reaction was: what a frightful commentary on the state of public opinion just now, if no politician dares tell it like it is. But then again, it is the very fact that Cameron is not telling it like it is, but instead just following idiotically behind Mr Brown, that is causing his current decline in the polls, which I confess I did not see coming.
I can’t recall who said it – I think one of the Coffee Housers – but the best recent comment on the Conservatives I heard said something like: Cameron was picked to deal with good times, in a way that Blair was doing, and Brown subsequently couldn’t. But face Cameron with a catastrophe, in which the option of pretending to be nice to everyone no longer exists, and he is a rabbit caught in the headlights. Mr Brown loves a good catastrophe and is benefitting from this one now, even though it is to an appalling extent a catastrophe of his own making. Like I say, I did not see that coming. The voters now face a choice between clever and determined but deluded, and nice – well, polite, in a smarmy old Etonian manner – but bewildered.
One thing I do seem to recall saying a few months ago, although I can’t recall when, was that Cameron believed he merely had to say and then do nothing in order to sail into power and stay there for a decade. Only “events” would upset such a calculation. Now, those events have arrived. Optimistic Conservatives presumably now hope that Cameron is “keeping his powder dry”, and will stir up a rhetorical storm come the actual election campaign, whenever it materialises and when it will be too late for Brown to steal all Cameron’s brilliant policies. But I am starting to think that Perry de Havilland has had Cameron’s number all along. There are no brilliant Cameron policies. There is no Cameron powder, or not the sort that accomplishes anything. Which means that a general election now would simply prolong the reign of idiocy, no matter who wins.
Tim Worstall, whom I read daily, has a good post dealing with the idea that it is somehow wicked for banks to charge a higher interest rate for a mortgage than the official base rate as set by the Bank of England (or any other central bank, come to that). It is, as he says, a matter of pricing for risk. Lending money to a person with a relatively small deposit – or collateral – relative to the total value of a loan is risky. I am going to have to renegotiate my mortgage in the next few weeks, and because the pricing of risk has risen dramatically, I can expect to pay more even though my loan-to-value ratio is quite low and I have a decent amount of equity, while both my wife and I earn a reasonable amount of money. It is not a great situation to be in, but it could be worse. For many years I chose to rent and stash up enough money to put down a good deposit, as did my wife. That, by the way, is one reason why there is a basic injustice when relatively prudent folk get taxed to bail out the imprudent, such as a person on a 100 per cent mortgage.
To be honest, had the price of risk not been artificially reduced by recklessly loose monetary policy over the past few years, we would not be in this pickle in the first place, but that’s another story.
Whenever you hear a politician, particularly a Tory politician, use the term “fiscally responsible“, this is a codeword for… will make no difference.
The true meaning is “we will not actually reduce the size of the state, we will just move the pain around a bit”.
You might think this is good news. From The Times:
Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ – People living in council houses will no longer be entitled to a subsidised tenancy for life under Whitehall proposals to address waiting lists. New tenants would have fixed-term contracts under the plans, with regular reviews every few years, The Times has learnt. […]
At the moment anyone allocated a council home can usually stay for life, irrespective of circumstances. People in council homes paying subsidised rents can end up relatively wealthy, and in some cases they can bequeath the tenancy to their children. Frank Dobson became a Cabinet Minister while living in a council flat in his London constituency.
But no, even this is not a move to logic and fairness, removing privilege from state clients and getting the state out of people’s lives. The bit I cut out reads:
If a tenant’s financial position improved he or she would be encouraged to take an equity share or to move to the private sector. If they refused they could face higher rents. The right to a council home is also likely to be tied to a requirement to have or be actively looking for a job.
The measures are being considered by Margaret Beckett, the new Housing Minister, in the most radical shake-up of the social housing system for decades to ensure that those who deserve council homes get them.
So this is not, repeat not, a plan to reduce dependency, to diminish the proportion of the population in receipt of the taxpayer’s subsidy, nor even to relieve poverty.
It looks like the proposals will be both more intrusive, bureaucratic and moralitarian than the present ones. Instead of in old socialist style checking people are poor enough to qualify for subsidised housing and leaving them to it, on the (generally correct) assumption that the dependent poor are unlikely in general to get much better off, and not worrying if some do, we are to look forward to a new grand scheme of supervision, whereby people are compelled continually to immiserate themselves for the inspectors in order to keep their roof. So there is to be a new premium to be created for inadequacy and profligacy.
But the dependent class may not be too miserable or helpless. The very people who in a reasonable humane system we might be willing to help (those too feeble or disturbed to be able to earn a living) will not be the ones that are targetted for assistance, but those who have or are actively looking for a job, who show every sign of being able to look after themselves, in other words.
How to explain this? It is neither likely to be economically efficient, nor is kindly (foolishly or otherwise).
We need to note that as a project it embodies Gordon Brown’s puritan obsession with “hard working families”. I do not particularly care if people are feckless or pleasure seeking as long as it is not at my expense. I rationally wish I could be a bit more feckless and pleasure seeking myself, but I can neither afford it, nor do I have a sybarite’s soul. But the Brownite regards suffering and struggle, social compliance, and resentment of the easy life, as the core moral values.
And this is of a piece with the politics of New New Labour. For the struggling compliant, resentful of others pleasure, are reliable voters for the gifts of authority. The feeble and disturbed who can make no shift for themselves are not voters at all. This is a plan to build, and politically police, a new client class.
[To pre-empt the objection that at least it gets rid of privileged access to council accomodation to party apparatchiks and local government employees, I would point out that that form of corruption is already obsolete. Such people now get subsidised equity as often as subsidised rent, and get to live with others like themselves, not among the lumpenproletariat on council estates, because they have a claim as key workers. Key workers (who are largely middle-class and paid above average, even including town planners and Connexions advisers) constitute another client class of the state that has been silently established this last decade. Welcome to nomenklatura UK.]
Times have changed, voters want the pendulum to swing back from spending towards tax cuts. Rumours are circulating in the Westminster Village that Gordon and Alastair are preparing to announce tax cuts. Which will, even if they are only rhetorical tax cuts, in a stroke make Dave and George look ridiculous as both Labour and the LibDems promise tax cuts and the Tories are left high and dry stranded on the high tax centre ground …
– Guido
I had a look at this test and think I would do reasonably okay. The only flaw in PM’s headline is that it refers to skills that men should know, but I would have thought this applies as much to women. As my wife likes to point out, she’s much smarter at changing a tyre on a car than most men we know.
“I have met several people, who when explaining the extreme youth or old age of their parents, have told me, “Of course, I was an accident.” Well, if they can admit it, why can’t we all. Our existence is not due to the preference of some fabulous Being: it is just dumb luck. Why people should feel bothered by this I don’t know. They have won the lottery of life!”
Jamie Whyte, Bad Thoughts, page 128
Before the end of this century, there will be another American Civil War.
Well, I reviewed the previous effort by Daniel Craig, so here we go with the next instalment: Quantum of Solace, with Daniel Craig in his second outing as Ian Fleming’s hero. It is the 22nd film in the series, which is quite something in itself, when you think about it. I went to see the film with pretty high expectations after what I thought was a great debut by Craig in Casino Royale.
Quantum of Solace – which has absolutely nothing to do with the short story Fleming wrote in a collection – is a sequel to the first Craig film. Having been betrayed and left heartbroken by the death of Vesper Lynd, 007 goes after the organisation that is behind the death of Lynd. We are led on a series of furious chases and action scenes in Italy, the Caribbean and Latin America. The direction of the movie is handled at an incredibly high tempo, much in the manner of the Bourne films starring Matt Damon. (Poor Matt, I haven’t been able to think of him in the same way again since watching Team America: World Police).
This is a very violent film. Craig did several of the stunts himself and got quite badly hurt in some of them. If you want lots of fight scenes, with minimal dialogue and no gags, this is for you. The problem, is that I think that Craig and his directors are trying far, far too hard to react against what they rightly regarded as s the foppish versions of Bond served up by the likes of Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan. QoS is a still a good film but it could have been much better with a bit more variation of pace, and a bit more opportunity for Craig to show how 007 is developing as an agent and as a person.
Supporting actors are generally good, if not as strong as in Casino. I like the chap who plays Felix Leiter, who is not the character of the books but I reckon is going to be a regular feature of future Bond films. Judy Dench is wonderful as M; in fact she holds much of the film together. But the other women in the film are not very strong characters and not a patch on Green’s Vesper.
I will give this film seven marks out of a possible 10. I would give Casino Royale 9 stars. The Bond franchise has definitely been rebooted by Craig, but the film-makers must not turn Bond into a humourless brute. The character created all those years ago was a tough bastard all right, but he was a bit more than that.
Is all change good? No. Only good change is good.
– although probably more quote of yesterday from Alice Bachini-Smith
PLUS: I just noticed this
PLUS: I also like this (via here)
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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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