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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“What is the point of growing food if you let them get destroyed by pests? And another thing, if a sheep gets a headache, I’d give it an asprin.”
That was broadly the gist of a remark made this morning on a BBC food show by Gregg Wallace, the grocer and UK television presenter, who is not a devotee of organic food. Ah, I thought, this guy is prepared to pull the chains of the organic purists on live TV! But then he spoiled it all by going on, as a lot of prominent TV chefs seem to do these days, about the supposed evils of Britain importing food and hence the locals not developing what he regards as a strong national culture that appreciates food. He also criticised working mothers for forgetting how to cook. I must say I smiled at this point since all the folk cooking on the show were men. To be fair, Mr Wallace did not go quite as far as that over-exposed blowhard, Gordon “four letter word” Ramsay, whom Perry of this parish criticised lately.
This is nonsense, to be polite about it. For a start, Mr Wallace bashed the enclosure of UK open land as somehow playing a part in Britain’s historically drab cuisine. Funny, because I thought that the enclosure of farms, and the development of the four-course rotation system that went along with it, helped to make possible the vital leap in UK food production, and hence a surplus, that freed up capital to be used elsewhere: the Industrial Revolution. Up until the late 18th Century, remember, starvation was a regular feature of life in Europe. So much so, in fact, that Thomas Malthus’s prediction that population growth would always be checked by starvation and food shortages was a reason why economics got known as the “dismal science”. Well, the Irish were “self sufficient” by living on potatoes while evil imports of cheap corn from abroad were restricted by the Corn Laws, a situation that came to a terrible conclusion in the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, in which millions of Irish families emigrated to the US to at least have the chance of something to eat. Self-sufficiency, indeed.
All this talk about self-sufficiency by the affluent members of today’s media and entertaiment classes does make me wonder at their lack of understanding of basic economics. To begin with, what sort of geographical area does Mr Wallace think it is acceptable for trade in agriculture to occur in? A county, a parish, a region, a nation, a small street, what? Furthermore, surely the benefits of diversification in agricultural production around the world, made possible by rapid transportation, refrigeration, storage techniques and the rest, actually makes the world as a whole less not more, vulnerable to sudden shifts in economic conditions, or the climate, or even war, although during wars, of course, it may be necessary to build up food supplies, as happened in the UK during WW2.
If it makes more sense economically to grow tomatoes in Spain and fly them over to Manchester rather than for Mancunians to eat only what our foodie superiors deem to be “in season”, why should not such imports occur? For sure, if you want to patronise your local farmers’ market to ensure that local farmers make a living, that is your right. But why are “local” farmers more “deserving” of your wallet than a farmer in Kenya, New Zealand or Canada? At this stage, the Greens will say it is a “waste” to import food from afar if that involves gobbling up expensive fuels, but then in a free market, if the cost of importing food becomes expensive, then local farmers can and should be exploiting that cost advantage. This in fact may already be happening.
And in any event, if there has been an improvement in the quality of food produce and restaurants in the UK in recent years – and I believe there has been – then trade, globalisation and mass transport have driven much of this. A generation that now regards it as routine to fly off to France for a long weekend courtesy of Ryanair or Easyjet has raised expectations of what should be on sale in shops in the UK. We should not forget the significance of the abolition of exchange controls in the UK in 1979 in also driving this increase in travel, and hence a broadening of tastes.
I am sure Mr Wallace means well. He comes across as the sort of no-nonsense, food-loving East End Boy made good for whom I have a lot of admiration. By all means encourage folk to learn more about food, to cook and appreciate food and fine wine. But for goodness sake, TV chefs, spare us propaganda about the evils of imports and stick to what you do best. That’s the division of labour for you.
Right, time for lunch.
The Republicans and their alter-ego Democrats have for decades used their control over the system to give Libertarians no end of grief on our ballot access campaigns. I remember one Libertarian pundit in the eighties commenting ‘it is easier to get on the ballot in Nicaragua than it is in the United States’.
Their mis-use of power has become more and more egregious these last few years. I still keep tabs on Pennsylvania because that is where my absentee ballot goes. The last time I voted I had to return large parts of it blank because the LP was not on it. On top of that, Democrat Murta’s people pulled some real low-life shenanigans to prevent our candidate in his district from running against him. I got the that story via private communications with the Pittsburgh LP of which I was a long ago member.
This year it is the Republicans taking the low road in Pennsylvania. I suspect we will defeat them in court there, but I and most LP supporters are not of the victim mentality. Simply responding to their efforts is just not satisfying enough.
Fortunately we have an opportunity to turn the tables on them in Texas. It seems both parties failed to deliver their papers to the appropriate authorities in Texas by the time of the legal deadline. This is Texas law. Had it been our party, we would have been shut out, no questions asked. move along now boy. We would have had no hope of getting on the ballot.
The Republicans and Democrats are different. They are the ruling class. Laws are made for us, not for them. So the Texas authorities have attempted to waffle around the problem. I am sure the Texas legislature will do whatever needs to be done to assure the McBama twins are on the ballot if they can get away with it.
Normally this would just be done behind the scenes in a ‘gentlemanly arrangement’. But not this time. We are going to rock their boat and with some luck teach them the bitter taste of their own anti-democracy medicine.
I remember several years ago when I commented on ‘having my right to vote stolen’ in Pennsylvania, some one commented my vote was not stolen because I could always do a write in. So if by chance we block Obama and McCain from the ballot in Texas this year all you Republicans and Democrats should not be at all fussed about it.
After all… you can just write in your candidate.
“In general the most important effect of the government attempt to shield itself and its clients from uncertainty and risk is to place the entire system in peril. It becomes at once too rigid and too soft to react resourcefully to the new shocks and sudden challenges that are inevitable in a dangerous world.”
– George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, page 235 (1981). His comment ought to be on the walls of every state regulatory authority and central bank.
Any regular reader of newspapers will be familiar with the phenomenon of the newspaper article which says one thing, but with a headline above it, written by someone completely different, saying something completely different. Yesterday’s Telegraph piece written by Bruno Waterfield, entitled Brussels admits defeat in EU blog wars is, I think, a good example. I read the headline and rejoiced, but then I read the article.
What Waterfield’s piece actually says is not that the EU has admitted defeat in the face of blogs, but that the EU commission does not like blogs. Blogs have enabled those who think ‘No’ to say ‘No’. Blogs are too cheap to be bought off or controlled, too easy to set up to be silenced. Blogs are bad news. Blogs have been especially bad news in Ireland, where Irish bloggers saying No lead directly to Irish voters voting No. But nowhere in Bruno Waterfield’s report did I read any suggestion that the EU commission is ready to give up in its struggle with this new media menace to its power, and just to lie back and allow people to put whatever they think up on the internet. On the contrary, this ‘secret’ report that Waterfield quotes from sounds to me not like a surrender at all, more like a declaration of war.
A question that occurred to me in some of the recent jousting on the Samizdata comment threads about Russia’s annexation of parts of Georgia was this: what other countries might get in the cross-hairs? It seems to me that there could be a real risk that Ukraine and the Baltic states like Latvia – many of which have Russian-speaking populations living among them – might “provoke” poor old put-upon Russia to send in the tanks. Questions:
What, if anything, will the NATO powers do about it?
What should such powers do?
Is the risk serious anyway?
In the late sixties and seventies I lived in DuPage county, Illinois. This was/is a county remarkable for the concentration of scientific and physical research conducted there. In addition to Argonne National Laboratories and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, there was the largest of Bell Laboratories many facilities, the one in Naperville/Lisle, Illinois that employed about 11,000 people. That period of time was the zenith of Bell Labs legendary status. In the seventies its employees received two of the six Nobel Prizes for Physics that have been awarded to Bell Lab’s researchers.
It was with sadness and some sense of foreboding that I learned via Instapundit this morning that Bell Labs is abandoning basic research and instead “focusing on more immediately marketable areas”. I say “foreboding” for the likelihood that Alcatel-Lucent will join the chorus (if it hasn’t already) of companies demanding that tax-payers assume the sole cost of basic research ‘for the common good’. I also say it because I believe it is the inevitable consequence of a long trend of companies being taken over by accounting priorities and run for short term profits. At least as recently as the late nineties, four Bell Labs researchers were awarded two Nobel Prizes for physics, one received his for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light and, three shared one ” for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect “. No, I have no clue. If you must know, look it up. Bell Labs has been my number one example that it is possible to do pure research without being part and parcel of the state.
I encourage you to read in the Wikipedia entry some of the history of Bell Labs. Perhaps some commenters can cheer me up with information about other profit motivated corporations (or individuals) engaging in pure, no application yet visible, research.
… or so they say:
As IDF came to a close, Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, presented a keynote speech in which he explained just how close the outfit was to realizing “programmable matter.” Granted, he did confess that end products were still years away, but researchers have been looking at ways to “make an object of any imaginable shape,” where users could simply hit a print button and watch the matter “take that shape.” He also explained that the idea of programmable matter “revolves around tiny glass spheres with processing power and photovoltaic for generating electricity to run the tiny circuitry.”
What I want is a shower I can step into, only it is not a shower. You just press a button that goes zxzxzxzxzxzxzxz, and ten seconds later you step out, with both you and your clothes completely clean.
The way things are going, soon they will be printing houses!
The US economist and cheerleader for the Democrats, Paul Krugman, reckons that George W. Bush is a “libertarian”. To which I would respond: “If only”.
US blogger David Bernstein is equally unimpressed:
Bush and McCain are Extreme Libertarians: So says Paul Krugman: “What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush’s or Mr. McCain’s philosophy.”
After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?
I take those who think that the modern Republican Party is an outpost of radical libertarianism about as seriously as those who think that the Democracts are getting ready to shoot the kulaks.
Well quite.
So there are many women voters who do indeed want to vote for a women. Just as there are many black voters who want to vote for a black person. After all Senator Obama does not get 90%+ of the black vote because most of these people say to themselves “I really like Barack’s interpretation of Karl Marx via Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, it is much better than the interpretation of …”
I doubt that one voter in a hundred even knows that Senator Obama is a Marxist – certainly the mainstream media have not informed of this.
– Paul Marks
I do not bother to write articles attacking leftist stuff from openly leftist publications or broadcasters.
For example, it may irritate me that the BBC sneer at Sarah Palin as “close to the oil industry” when, in fact, the lady exposed corrupt links between oil and Alaska politics. And it may be annoying that the BBC sneers that Governor Palin made her speech with “her husband and children in tow”, when it did not say that Senator Obama had “his wife and children in tow” when he made his speech. But the BBC is the BBC… it is a leftist broadcaster and its job is to present a leftist view of the world – although it is irritating that people are forced to pay for the BBC.
However, the Economist is different, it claims to be a free market magazine (sorry “newspaper”) dedicated to rolling back the state – and it simply is not.
The latest example is the front cover story “Bring back the real McCain“. When one turns to the article it turns out to be yet another Economist attack on the “irresponsible” policy of John McCain – the policy of trying to keep tax rates from being increased, and even reducing some of the absurdly high tax rates presently in place. The general tone of the article was both that tax cuts for “the rich” are immoral and that, on top of this, they must be “paid for”.
Contrary to what the Economist seems to believe, it was not the reduction of top rates of tax that was the problem under President Bush – on the contrary the revenue from the top rates of tax increased. It was the wild increase in government spending that has been the problem under President Bush.
Not just the mis-management of the Iraq war, although whatever one thinks of the judgement to go into Iraq in the first place the lack of planning for an insurgency meant a lot more blood and treasure being spent in the long run than would have been spent if more troops had been sent in the first place. There has also been all the subsidies, new entitlement programs and other wild spending and, again contrary to what the Economist thinks, the “earmarks” have been very important – for often Congressmen and Senators only vote for a spending bill because of the little earmark for some special interest buried on page…
And who in the Senate has been the most important voice of opposition to all this wild spending over the last few years – for all his faults, it has been John McCain. So for the Economist to claim he is not tough enough on spending to “pay for” his desire to make taxation less heavy is absurd, anti-earmark McCain is but it does not stop there – and, as stated above, the earmarks grease the wheels for the rest of the spending.
As for the idea that higher rates of tax at the top end will mean more revenue, the basis of the Economist claim that not ending the Bush tax rate reductions will cost X vast amount of revenue, this claim does not just ignore the reality of higher revenue from the reductions in the top rates of certain taxes under Bush, it ignores what happened under both Reagan and Thatcher, and under President Kennedy, and under every government that has reduced high top rates of tax since at least the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany in the 18th century. Perhaps Grand Duke Leopold is too recent for the Economist writers, but to the horror of collectivists, “tax cuts for the rich” really do “pay for themselves”.
However, there is also another factor. On the very day the Economist hit the shelves, its sister publication the Financial Times reported that yet more companies were leaving the United Kingdom because of our very high rate of Corporation Tax.
Yes, you guessed it, the American combined State and Federal Corporation Tax burden is actually worse than that of the United Kingdom. “But lots of American corporations do not pay Corporation Tax” – the ones that make losses do not pay for they have no profits to pay tax out of (hint – this is not a good thing for the corporations concerned), other companies do not pay because they are not “corporations” at all – they are privately owned companies whose owners pay income tax on their profits.
Sadly ignorant of all of the above, the Economist specifically targeted John McCain’s proposal to reduced the rate of Corporation Tax as one of his “irresponsible” policies.
John McCain is no economic genius, but has shown the ability to learn. The Economist writers show no such ability, all they can do is to trot out the moronic collectivism they were taught at school and university. I know I have said this before, but it needs saying whilst the Economist still pretends to be a “free market” publication.
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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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