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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The Cato Institute blog makes this observation:
Some commentators are suggesting that the McCain campaign has panicked about Sarah Palin’s appeal, trying to cram her head with policy-wonkery and then hiding her in a closet when that didn’t work. Let Palin be Palin, they say — let her show her authentic self, the gun-totin’, family-raisin’, reformist governor that Alaskans love.
Good idea. Let’s start with the bailout. Surely a rugged individualist reformer from way outside the Beltway is champing at the bit to denounce this $700 billion bailout for Wall Street insiders cooked up by Washington insiders behind closed doors, without public hearings, with the unanimous support of the mainstream media. Let ‘er rip, Governor Palin. Tell the Wall Street bankers that when a small business makes bad decisions in Wasilla, it goes out of business, and the same rules should apply to large businesses in Manhattan. That’s the Sarah Palin conservatives say America would love.
I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to see the reaction if she did give the bailout the finger, though. Judging by some of the media coverage of her and the credit crunch, large parts of the MSM press would lose their minds completely.
Yours truly escaped from the credit crunch, his computer keyboard and endless work hassles to get some much-needed relaxation in the Greek island of Crete last week. I can strongly recommend it, although not all aspects of life in that island are an unalloyed joy (they seem to assume that British tourists want chips with everything). I noticed that the locals have an agreeably “f**k you” approach to things like any smoking bans in restaurants, at least judging by my own observations. And I noticed that the driving standards have not improved much since I was last in Greece in 1992. A taxi driver who took me and the missus to the airport held a mobile phone in his hand, had innumerable phone calls and was busily texting his wife/mistress/whoever during a drive down a twisty lane. At one point I even suggested that this might not be a bright idea. I might as well have been talking to a martian.
Of course, such things are foolish and silly. And using a mobile phone while driving is dangerous. But maybe what has happened is not that the Greeks have got any nuttier or more reckless. It is that we Brits have, wittingly or otherwise, become even more safety conscious and worried about risk. Sometimes it takes a passage of time and a contrast with another culture to realise that.
The first portion of Reason’s Counter Debate is now available. I quite enjoyed listening to Bob Barr pointing out the economic nonsense of the two ‘major’ party candidates.
My impression from the debate is I agree with Bob Barr on his economics and McCain on the war that is coming to an end. It is, however, economics which look to be the big worry right now. It is a shame Bob Barr was not invited. He would have injected a little bit of capitalist free-market sense into the event.
Watching the UK’s Channel 4 programme tonight, hosted by Jon Snow, whose leftist views are easily discernible, I sensed an aspect of the coverage of the present financial turmoil that bothered me. Several times, during various back-and-forth questions with such luminaries as the left wing journalist Will Hutton and the Cazenove economist Richard Jeffries (I know Richard, he is a smart guy), Snow came up with the idea that instruments such as financial derivatives were “peddled” by banks and other institutions to investors. You see, the viewer was supposed to understand, buying or selling a swap, or a future, an option, a warrant, or basket of bonds and equities is like buying or selling crack cocaine or a porno magazine, not that I have a problem with porn magazines.
Of course, given the way in which hedge funds have been accused of colluding to destroy financial institutions such as Britain’s HBOS – which is beyond daft given that only a small fraction of HBOS shares were available to be short-sold in the first place – we can expect more of this demonisation of financial markets. Please understand me, gentle readers. I am not saying that banks and other intermediaries are not at times at fault for what has happened. Clearly it sticks in the throat to see bankers earn vast salaries in the good times and then bawl like so many 1980s coalminers or wheat farmers when the taxpayer refuses to get them out of trouble. I was grimly satisfied to see that the US allowed Lehman Brothers to go down, since it showed that at least some policymakers in the US were willing to see risk-takers pay the price of risks that have gone awry. But let there be no mistake: the financial derivative instruments that are being credited with voodoo powers by financial dunderheads like Will Hutton or Mr Snow are not the essence of the problem.
Derivatives are, after all, borne out of the desire by people to offload risks and by the desire of others to take those risks on; they are a consequence of the different appetite for bearing risk that occurs in any open market economy. Some people like uncertainty, others do not. That difference explains how, in a world of price movement, it is possible for people to swap uncertainty for certainty and vice-versa. It is the basis of insurance, for example. Without speculators willing to bear risks of fluctuations in everything from wheat to interest rates, other, more timid souls would not have fixed-rate mortgages or upfront payments for their wheat. Without those hedge funds, other, more cautious investors would not get prices for their investments, and so on.
We are in the midst of a very scary time in the financial world and there is no point in my trying to obscure that fact. I work in the wealth management business and have seen even some of the smartest minds in the business lose their heads. But I detect a decidedly unpleasant whiff in the air of scapegoating in the current time. One almost can hear an echo of anti-semitism, or something very similar.
Meanwhile, Roger Kimball pins much of the blame on US policies designed to encourage risky borrowers to get credit. He has got a point. I would also repeat the point that with Japan and other Asian countries operating ultra-low interest rates for a long time, these countries acted like ATM machines for the rest of the world. As Paul Marks of this parish likes to point out, until interest rates are based on a genuine balance between the demand for and stock of savings, the monetary system of the world will keep creating bubbles like this.
Update: here is a fine essay by economics historian Robert Higgs about how disastrous policy responses in the US ensured that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 mutated into a decade-long slump. Over and over again, it is necessary to nail the myth of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Far from “saving” US capitalism from itself, FDR lengthened the misery; unemployment was higher by the outbreak of WW2 than when he was elected to office.
Meanwhile, China legalises short selling:
China’s action contrasts with regulators in the U.S., Europe and Australia that have banned short selling in the past week to shore up financial shares battered by the global credit squeeze. China’s government is betting the changes will boost trading without spurring further declines after state share buybacks helped the CSI 300 Index rebound from a two-year low.
That is partly it. But mostly what China’s government seems to me to have been doing for many years now is tackling every domestic economic problem it has with a free market solution, and betting that even if such measures do not solve the immediate problem, they help in the longer run.
Via here and here.
“The investment business is based on people being able to do what they want with their money. They may want to do some odd things. “People put their money where their thoughts are,” said one investment banker I interviewed. This means that there are a lot of men who are, so to speak, in financial topless bars, sticking millions of dollars into the G-strings of lap-dancing debts and equities.”
– PJ O’Rourke, Eat The Rich (page 27).
I have just read an article here (with thanks to Glenn Reynolds) which reports some really good news:
FURTHER UPDATE: The New York State law has now gone national. A House bill declares that foreign libel judgments are unenforceable in the United States. And Arlen Specter, Joe Lieberman and Chuck Schumer want to go further still:
Indeed, the ACLU, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, the PEN American Center, the Families of the 9/11 victims, and many others support the Free Speech Protection Act, 2008 (S. 2977) sponsored by Senators Arlen Specter, Joseph Lieberman and Chuck Schumer. Their legislation would allow U.S. writers to bring a federal cause of action against those who bring libel suits against them, in foreign jurisdiction for writing that does not constitute defamation under U.S. law . The Specter bill, like King’s (H.R. 5814) would also bar enforcement of foreign libel judgments and provide other appropriate injunctive relief and damages by U.S. Courts.
This has been done to put a total stop on efforts of individuals who, just to invent a hypothetical case mind you, travel from Saudi Arabia to the United Kingdom to sue a publisher in the United States. I can not imagine anyone doing something like that of course…
I have heard a bit of backchannel news from the network infrastructure guys in North America. It appears that the text of the Bailout giveaway went up and the government server got hit by the Slashdot effect. It became unreachable due to the huge volume of traffic caused by people attempting to get their hands on the Reid-Pelosi financial free for all bill. From what I have heard, this is not just pork… it is the whole damn pig sty.
The launch live webcast link is here..
2322. This could be an interesting evening. As you know, the third launch failed at staging. It was quickly determined that the cause of this was a ‘burp’ from the Merlin engine after shutdown. There is some fuel and oxidizer left in the system when the engine shuts down, and in a regen engine there will be a bit more because the oxidizer is warmed and the nozzle cooled by running it through tubes around the outside of the bell. When they checked test data they found this had actually occurred in a ground test but the transient was ‘down in the weeds’ at sea level pressure and had not been noticed as it was perhaps only a tenth of an atmosphere of pressure and thus hidden in the 1.0 sea level pressure. At high altitude the ambient was near zero so the burp was significant. What happened then, was that after a perfect first stage burn and a flawless staging… the engine burped perhaps 2 seconds after sep and was enough to cause the first stage to ram the second stage just as it was ready to fire.
For flight four they have raised the delay from first stage cutoff to stage separation from 3 second to 5 seconds to account for this. There were no other flight anomalies of any significance on flight 3; flight 2 with the earlier Merlin regen engine has successfully staged and fired the Kestrel engine almost to second stage cut off so I am hopeful we will see a successful orbital insertion today.
2349. Fueling is in progress and near completion, or at least as near as they will go this early. The final top off will not occur until later in the launch. I am wondering if this might be partly to prevent the RP1 (kerosene) from chilling down as much as it did on a previous flight. Ah, the webcast has just now gone live.
0011. They are into the terminal count but they have been giving us loads of talking head chatter instead of the interesting stuff. I’d much rather listen to the real internal loop than people assigned to interpret to us. There is in any case only about 5 minutes to go.
0013. As you can see if you are watching the video, the tower is retracted, and we are now hearing the real control loop. 2:30 to go! Launch director gave a green, range is green, about 1 minute to go!
0018. She’s going up and looking great so far! Max Q… first stage going great. Getting close to time for pitch over and MECO.
0021. Second stage is burning beautifully!!!!!! There is no roll problem this time. Now we wait 4 minutes as she goes down range.
0022. No sign of roll anomalies like on flight 2. The slosh baffles are doing their job. 315 km high now…
0024. Almost there… the bell glows red hot but it is built for that. We now have lost signal, probably due to range.
We are waiting now for whether we got the orbital insertion…. and…. THEY HAVE DONE IT!!!!!!
0043. They are in orbit with their dummy satellite. The only things we need to hear now is whether they get a successful recovery of the 1st stage from the Pacific. It should have come down on parachutes but I don’t expect I will hear about that until ‘tomorrow’. I feel a bit like Elon… I hardly know what to say. I must admit that I was here screaming like the SpaceX employees and I now feel just limp, tired and very, very happy. So… another Falcon 1 launch latter this year and then on to the much larger Falcon 9 next year!
The SpaceX test flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle is scheduled for Sunday. That means around midnight in my part of the world and earlier in the USA.
I will be here as usual, giving a blow by blow live-blogging of the event. My gut feel says they make it this time. But that and a shiny new pound coin will get you a small cup of coffee at the local coffee shop.
Here is a very nice Q&A with Elon Musk done by the Washington Post.
2300. The launch webcast link is now up.. Coverage should start in about a half hour.
I am troubled at the spread of a certain meme. It is hostile to liberty, yet seems to be fairly popular with those who in other respects defend freedom of speech and abhor State interference in personal relations. In the comments to this Samizdata post, a regular commenter here, ‘Mandrill’, expressed this particular meme unambiguously:
It should be illegal for any adult, parent or not, to indoctrinate any child in any religion, period. If they choose to follow one of the multitudinous superstitions which we’ve infected our intellects with once they’re an adult that’s their business, but to poison a child’s mind against reason from a very young age is, in my view, abuse and is something that stunts not only the intellectual growth of the child but that of the rest of humanity also. Just as much as genital mutilation (male or female) is.
That is all.
I have a few more examples that I have collected at the end of the post. Those quoted are not necessarily famous or influential, only those that I bestirred myself to note down or to find by casual googling. Trust me, there are plenty more out there. Feel free to add your own examples in comments. I would also welcome comments from anyone – such as Mandrill – who thinks this is a good meme.
Meanwhile let me speculate on how what I hold to be an insidious and bad meme is propagating itself with some success among them as should know better. Such qualities as ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ and ‘internal consistency’ are often useful characteristics for a meme to have but are by no means essential to its success as a replicator.
1) Firstly, the ‘ban religion for children’ meme appeals by a having a spurious similarity to generally accepted ideas about when and whether sex should be prohibited. Most of us accept that consenting adults can do what they like, but children and mentally deficient people cannot give meaningful consent. My answer to that is sex is sex and talk is talk.
Campaign groups often try to ‘borrow’ some of the public willingness to abhor and forbid certain sexual acts and use it to get the public to abhor and forbid non-sexual acts of which the pusher disapproves. For instance, campaigners against smacking children often blur the boundaries between sexual and physical child abuse. In a loosely related way campaigners against rape sometimes blur the boundaries between forced sexual intercourse i.e. rape and the sort of ‘force’ involved in the use of emotional blackmail to get sex. → Continue reading: Cherchez le mème
My favourite commentary on all the financial mayhem of the last few days and hours is this, from Scrappleface:
“To sustain this shining city on a hill,” Mr. Bush said, “we need to rescue the ignorant, irresponsible folks – from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to Main Street – who got us to where we are today. We must guarantee that no American suffers the soft bigotry of being forced to live with the consequences of his bad decisions.”
The president, in remarks to the news media clearly aimed at reluctant Republicans in Congress, said, “Our financial system rests on a foundation of huge banks, brokerage houses and quasi-governmental agencies that followed Washington’s lead by gambling on long-shot, poorly-collateralized investments. Now this glorious way of life is threatened, and we must act to preserve it.”
“We need to guarantee that the structures, systems, people and products that got us to this point won’t be tossed on the ash heap of history,” said Mr. Bush. “If these giant companies fail, then America will be left with nothing but thousands of small to mid-sized financial firms that made prudent investment decisions during the past 15 years.”
I’ll skip the next paragraph, if only so that I can say read the whole thing without having already stolen the whole thing, but the final paragraph demands inclusion:
“It is a moral imperative that we guard the civil rights of these idiots,” he said. “If we fail, then we face the specter of free market capitalism run amok, and millions of Americans will feel the painful lash of personal responsibility across their backs.”
One of the reasons I like this is because it makes me laugh, while at the same time allowing me still to be Thinking About It All, rather than just escaping into pure escapism.
One thing I do strongly believe (“know” would be putting it too strongly) that is relevant to all this mess is that the Great Depression was not caused by the Wall Street Crash, but by the mistaken things done before and after – especially after – the Wall Street Crash. To say that the Crash caused the Depression is that old folly of blaming the messenger for the message. It is now clear to us all, to those to whom it was not clear at the time, that the mistakes made during the previous few years have done a lot of damage. But I fear that the mistakes being made right now will prove even more costly.
And if I had to decide about all this, right now, knowing only what I know now, I’d say: let the market now do its job. The economy has been fatally mixed in recent years. Unmix it. If you have just lost your shirt, the taxpayer won’t buy back so much as a button for you. Yes, cruel, and I certainly wouldn’t say that every shirtloser has been stupid, as Scrappleface’s Presdent Bush does. And such cruelty is certainly not how you win elections. But far more cruel would be (will be?) changing the rules of the entire game for the worse.
Update: Von Mises Institute Bailout Reader.
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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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