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Blimey, those Atlas Shrugged themes keep on coming. Glenn Reynolds has a collection of reader thoughts about how, assuming Obama or for that matter, McCain wins, entrepreneurial vigour will be hit by any rise in taxes, particularly things like capital gains tax. Obama wants to raise CGT, which would be damaging to the US equity market, hence pension savings, not to mention curb new business formation. Way to go, Barack! Even so, the idea of entrepreneurs consciously choosing to cut back on any business plans while they sit out the first year or two of a leftist presidency is striking. Small businessmen and women are not getting much attention from politcians right now. No surprise: small businesses are disruptive; they tend not to be much interested in screwing subsidies or other benefits out of the state and are consequently not widely chased for campaign contributions. For sure, now and again a politician might talk about “helping small businesses” but there is a sort of going-through-the-motions aspect to it which means the pols do not really care that much. Just ask Joe The Plumber.
It is easy, in the current fears about the state of the world economy and what might be in store, to lose sight of what has actually been achieved in recent years. Fuelled by a mixture of education, supply-side tax cuts, a benign regulatory climate and the emergence of computers, small businesses in California’s Silicon Valley and other parts of the world have driven much of the growth seen in the past 20-plus years. Sure, big businesses get on the front page of Time or The Economist, but the small, or not-even-yet-started firms are the ones that matter. If the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurs are held back, we are all in a lot of trouble.
Anway, unlike some people who seem to want to torture themselves by sitting up all night to watch the elections, I shall be heading off to watch the latest James Bond film. Friends tell me it is not as good as the last one, with too much head-spinning action and not enough characterisation or jokes. But watching Daniel Craig blasting along in his Aston surely has to be better than watching Mr Magoo or The Community Organiser from Chicago. It is a shame Mr Fleming could not have written a novel where a bunch of crooked politicians wind up in a pool of sharks. Maybe that should be the next plot. Perhaps I’ll go ahead and write it.
Many of you will remember that back before the Democratic primary I was one of those who argued for a term of Hillary to help the Republicans understand that small government, liberty minded people won’t vote for the lesser of two evils indefinitely. My goal was and is always long term and I think four years of Hillary would have been a Carteresque setup for a popular swing in the direction of personal liberty and small government.
Three factors I didn’t anticipate have changed the dynamic since then. Any one of them would be an argument against that plan but, taken together, they add up to a veto. → Continue reading: I decided to endorse McCain/Palin
Free speech is about the state dictating what is or is not acceptable, not about free people freely expressing contempt for contemptible behaviour.
– Commenter Counting Cats
Formula One motor racing doesn’t usually excite me that much, because far too often F1 races are just tedious processions, in an order determined not by drivers but by mechanics, with far too much seeming to depend on pit stops and refuelling strategies. But the Brazilian Grand Prix today was something else again. On the very last lap of the race, Lewis Hamilton moved from 6th place to the 5th place that he had to get to be the champion, given that his rival Massa had just won the race. Minutes earlier it had started to rain, and Hamilton had switched to wet weather tires but the guy he had to overtake stuck with dry weather tires. It had to rain properly for Hamilton to win. It did, just enough for Hamlton to overtake on the second last bend of the race, in other words right at the end of the final lap of the entire season. Amazing. Youngest ever F1 champion, apparently. So, no credit crunch for him.
As for the big money that the England cricket team were chasing in the West Indies on Saturday, well … better luck next year. They will have to play very badly indeed to do worse than they did this time around. Plus, I thought that this headline was about the cricket, but it seems there was another English sporting fiasco this weekend, in rugby league. Oh well, win some lose some. It’s only games.
I was wrong. I thought I had already found the world’s most ludicrously named chain of clothing stores.
However, the world is full of things that one has not dreamed of. In Hong Kong last week I found this.
Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph, urges Britons compelled to pay the outrageous tax, sorry, licence fee to the BBC should refuse to do so following the recent episode over two radio presenters who chose to mock an elderly actor about one of the presenters having had sex with the actor’s grand-daughter. I urge readers to read the Moore article. It is devastating and gets to the heart of why the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross saga is not just a minor issue, but a brutal example of what is happening in the culture of the UK.
It is a lamentable fact about Britain that one of the things we are best known for these days is braying vulgarity, rudeness and cruelty, although certain issues, such as football hooliganism, seem to have become a bit less of a problem in recent years. For example, I tend to find US television far funnier, far sharper and yet also less cruel. Of course this is a generalisation – I am sure Samizdata readers living abroad can give me examples of cruelty-as-entertainment – but in the UK, it is becoming more and more the norm, not the exception. And the BBC, paid for by a tax, is at the heart of it. What is even more pathetic about the brutality of this culture is that its targets are not powerful dictators or scoundrels, since that might be dangerous. It is the sheer cowardice of these folk that appals.
As Sean Gabb has written, the BBC is part of the “enemy class”. As libertarians, we need to realise that privatising the odd bit of the state is not enough. The BBC, as part of the media class that is so interwoven with the political, corporatist class, must be destroyed, totally.
I must say that one of the few gratifying aspects of the current financial turmoil has been the way in which one of the UK’s biggest banks, Barclays, has decided to spurn any offers of help from the UK government – ie, the UK taxpayer – and raise funds from mostly private investors. In its recent raising of about $12 billion of funds to improve its capital position, Barclays made it clear that it wanted to stick with funding via the commercial market because, if it had drawn on the UK state moneys that have been provided for the likes of Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, it would lose its freedom to set pay, among other things.
Now, free market purists may object that the Middle Eastern funds that have pumped cash into Barclays are not entirely private sector organisation and of course they have a point. But the fact is that as a taxpayer, I haven’t been asked to write a checque to Barclays, in contrast to other UK banks. Barclays has also kept its affairs away from the hands of such characters as Alistair Darling, the UK finance minister. Those banks which have taken state aid face the risk that the confidentiality of their clients, especially in the wealth management area, could be compromised. Of course, even before 9/11, banks have been required to compromise on secrecy due to things like money laundering laws and the like. But there is no doubt that once a bank becomes an arm of the state, such erosions of client confidentiality that have already occurred will increase.
And the reaction of certain parts of the media has been interesting. On Friday evening, the BBC economics correspondent, Robert Peston, told us in that extraordinary voice of his how Barclays shareholders would be penalised by having to pay a higher amount to obtain funding than if they had, like good little corporatists, gone along to the UK Treasury. Peston, as a corporatist himself and creature of New Labour, cannot fathom why a bank wants to stay out of the public sector. Barclays’ executive bonuses may be “obscene” as far as Peston is concerned, but at least Barclays avoided some of the worst excesses of the credit boom. It is, as a result, relatively strong as a bank. Barclays must be thankful that it lost a merger battle to buy ABN Amro last year. If its refusal to eat from the state table annoys BBC journalists – who of course are paid out of a tax – then the bank must have done something very right. One cannot exactly say that of a lot of banks these days.
These pictures are pretty cleverly done. (Via Andy Ross).
During the recent LA/LI Conference, Sean Gabb, half of the two-man team that now runs the Libertarian Alliance (Tim Evans being the other half) sat himself down next to me and asked me to suggest good speakers for next year. My best two suggestions were two Michaels.
Michael Jennings will be well-known to regular readers here as an expert on technological trends and much else besides. He would be exactly the kind of second-tier speaker, and I mean this in no disrespectful way, who maybe isn’t a superstar name who would cause dozens more attendees to sign up in the first place, but who would add greatly to the enjoyment and enlightenment of the event for all who did attend. Technology, I am sure you will agree, can be relied upon to keep on supplying interesting trends for someone like Michael to talk about.
And the other Michael I suggested was Michael O’Leary, the boss of Ryanair. Okay, definitely a first-tier speaker, but equally definitely a long shot. But what’s the worst he can say? No, too busy running Britain’s largest low fares airline, you can afford my air fares but not me but the best of luck anway being what he probably would say, if anything, if asked.
Ryanair press releases are actually fun to read (like some of Sean Gabb’s, come to think of it). Here is a typically populist and opportunistic snippet from the latest one:
Ryanair, Britain’s largest low fares airline, today (31st Oct) offered to rescue Jonathan Ross after he was ‘Sent to Coventry’ by the bigwigs at the BBC. Ryanair will help Ross jet off to much more exotic surrounds as it sent him free tickets to escape the media spotlight and sample how those who don’t earn £18million a year live.
Ryanair, called on the black sheep of the BBC, who will lose £1.5million over the next 12 weeks, to make his money go further by escaping the high cost of living in Mayfair and fly on one of Ryanair’s over 350 UK routes where he can live cheaper, get a tan and gear himself up for his return to the beeb next year.
Does Coventry have an airport, I wonder?
O’Leary’s open contempt for state monopolies of all kinds, but especially in the airline business (on the ground and in the air), is most pleasing. A growing trend in public opinion, especially since this latest wall-of-taxpayer-money bailout of dodgy banks, is the alignment of enthusiasm for free markets with populism, while statist solutions to problems are becoming regarded more and more as elitist manipulations, the rich helping themselves to public money on scale that the poor could never dream of. O’Leary feeds into that current, I think, especially in the way he bangs on about how much more you often have to pay the government, when you fly Ryanair, than you have to pay him.
Michael Jennings, constant globetrotter that he is, could doubtless tell libertarians about the impact of low fare airlines on the world, even if Michael O’Leary is otherwise engaged.
There’s a rather comical culture clash now being played out in the West Indies, between new money and cricket:
Senior ECB officials, who almost bent over backwards to welcome Stanford and his millions at Lord’s last summer, were also under fire with calls for them to stand down after failing to undertake adequate checks on Stanford. Rod Bransgrove, Hampshire’s chairman, told the Daily Telegraph that the position of Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, was in doubt. “I asked the ECB to do a lot more checking on Stanford and this competition. We made it very clear we that we should not enter into this agreement without proper checks but he [Clarke] had already done the deal. The board should resign collectively”.
The ECB and Stanford agreed on an unprecedented US$100 million deal in the summer, spread over five years, but the inaugural competition this week in Antigua has attracted mounting criticism in England.
The flack really started to fly on Monday when Stanford was pictured with Matt Prior’s wife on his knee and with his arms around two other girlfriends of members of the England team during a match the night before. It provoked a strong reaction from parts of the media, and in addition, one England player reportedly said: “If that was my wife he’d put on his lap I would have wanted to punch him”.
Last night’s planned cocktail party with the teams was cancelled at short notice, with officials rather unconvincingly claiming there were “logistical problems over a venue”. One journalist was unconvinced. “As if Stanford would ever have trouble in securing a venue for anything in Antigua,” he noted. “He owns most of them.”
I recall boasting here a while ago that my grandfather was the captain of his local cricket team by virtue of the fact that he owned the pitch. This was in Dingestow, which is a small village in Monmouthshire. My cousin still lives there, in the biggest house there, which is called Dingestow Court. But that’s old money. Old money pitch owners would make irrational bowling and field placing decisions, but they wouldn’t mess with other cricketer’s wives or ‘girl friends’, i.e. ladies whom other cricketers were courting.
All of this trouble in the West Indies now has arisen because of the rather sudden eruption of Twenty20 cricket. It turns out that, unlike so much of old school test cricket, people will pay large amounts of money to go and watch Twenty20, even between relatively moderate players. Suddenly cricket has become a very, very big, very twenty-first century business. And the cricket world is finding it tricky to adjust. It hit me the other day what a huge impact Twenty20 cricket is having when I half noticed (as you do when watching the telly) a TV advert for some kind of computerised or perhaps gambling-related version of soccer, which they were also calling “Twenty20”. Cricket is now featured in the sports pages of the popular press in Britain in a way that it hasn’t been for years, except during an Ashes series.
Here is some more Stanford grumbling. English cricket, says former England captain Mike Atherton, has become Stanford’s WAG.
Dizzy, of Dizzy Thinks fame, recently made an interesting prediction, concerning the attitude of Brits towards the USA:
If Barack Obama becomes President-Elect next week, don’t expect any of the snide anti-american Brits, Aussie and others to change their tune. They’ve had a hate figure in Bush for the past eight years, and I don’t doubt that Barack Obama will become an equal hate figure within a short amount time.
I do doubt this. I think that much anti-Americanism is really anti- a particular part of America, and this hatred is felt with equal strength by other parts of America. President Bush, after all, is not only hated in Britain. Many Americans hate him too. And Obama is from a very different part of America to the part that gave us President Bush. Obama is from one of the parts that hates President Bush.
I recall the Clinton years. Had the (very large) part of Britain that now hates Bush wanted to hate Clinton, it would have had at least as much to work with as it has had with Bush. But it didn’t want to hate Clinton, and it didn’t. Likewise, it won’t want to hate Obama, and it won’t.
Well, we shall probably soon see.
Someone asked me what I was going to be doing on November 4th. I said I will most likely watch television, probably Battlestar Galactica or a re-run of Firefly. I may well go to dinner with my inamorata at some point and after that I may indulge my intermittent MMO habit and get a fix of virtual violence.
Gawd knows there is nothing else that I give a damn about happening on that day.
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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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