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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A friend of mine (“Don’t give any names!”) has just told me some very good news. The friend of mine’s landlady has a way of dealing with nasty lodgers, who don’t pay (despite being warned), or who make too much noise at night (despite being warned), or who do anything else evil (despite being warned). She expels them! That’s right, she chucks them out. This is illegal, and they (the scum being chucked out) often point this out. But it works. She has her own locks to the doors, which she duly locks. And just puts all their crap out onto the street and refuses to let them in ever again. They have the law on their side, but what bloody use is that if you need somewhere to live tonight and all your crap is out on the street? The law takes months!
The landlady has now done this thirty six times, including last Sunday, just after Church (the landlady is a born again Christian). They smoked indoors, and left hairs in the bathroom. They were warned, but paid no attention.
Good to know. Civil society is being re-established. See this, linked to, again, by Patrick Crozier today, for details. Be civil. Or suffer the consequences.
A successful interception of the falling NRO satellite by a US Navy SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) occurred at approximately 10:26 p.m. EST last night. It was hit over the Pacific and much of it will have re-entered and burned up by the time you read this. Remaining shrapnel is in a low orbit and will be down within a few weeks at most.
Great shooting guys!
The Financial Times is very much the house journal of corporatist Britain; while not blind to the needs for a vigorously entrepreneurial culture, it tends to be hemmed in by a general acceptance of government and its hold on our lives. This headline says it all in the assumptions that underpin that newspaper:
“Boost for Darling as tax takings increase.”
Marvellous.
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
– Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943.
“Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required “little else…but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice.” But those three things were then – and are now – the three hardest things in the world to find. Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood. The Wealth of Nations is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn’t trying to change the roof’s mind about crushing us.”
– P.J. O’Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations.
O’Rourke’s book – a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket – is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O’Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland’s most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered – not always accurately – to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. He was not particularly fond of businessmen and some of his comments on the latter’s tendencies to collude smacked almost of that fear of big business that later spawned the madness known as anti-trust legislation in the US and elsewhere. He supported a version of the labour theory of value that was ultimately taken to its absurd conclusion by Marx; but Smith being Smith, he was the sort of man who also kind of understood that the value of something is what people will pay for it, nothing else. I suspect – although I cannot prove this – that Smith had the open kind of mind to accept the marginal-utility approach to understanding prices that eventually pounded the labour theory into dust (although not quickly enough to prevent the horrors of Communist economics). → Continue reading: Inquiring into Adam Smith
Private military security companies have expanded their remit in recent years, raked in higher profits from governments using their services and started to undertake campaigns to legitimate their newfound status.
There are pros and cons to using such companies in wartime, and there is a danger that core defence spending is reduced in favour of such companies, when we could do with some poor bloody infantry and a lot less Eurofighters or useless frigates.
Is it War on Want‘s role to really demand that the government act upon this? Their charitable remit is stated as anti-poverty in their press release, and it is unclear why forcing legislation through Parliament would do anything to reduce poverty or alleged human rights abuses by such companies:
The challenge, from the anti-poverty charity War on Want, follows mounting reports of human rights abuse by mercenaries employed by private military and security companies in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Last October guards working for British firm Erinys International opened fire on a taxi near Kirkuk, wounding three civilians. In September mercenaries from the American private military company Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Earlier a video published on the internet showed mercenaries from UK-based Aegis Defence Services randomly shooting at civilian cars from the back of their vehicle on the road to Baghdad airport. War on Want, calling for legislation including a ban on mercenaries’ use in combat, cites hundreds of incidents which have involved guards from Aegis and another British firm ArmorGroup in shootings. In the first four months of 2007 mercenaries working for ArmorGroup were engaged in combat action 293 times. Aegis mercenaries have been involved in combat action 168 times in the last three years and have seen eight employees killed, according to its chief executive officer, Tim Spicer. Spicer broke a UN arms embargo on Sierra Leone with his former company Sandline International, and was jailed in Papua New Guinea for earlier activities.
The calls for ‘democratic’ control of the private security companies are accompanied by demands that they are not allowed a role in combat. That seems to defeat the point of employing mercenaries and avoids looking at the problem: what rules are required for policing the actions of the private security companies.
The problem of abuse is clear and extends to any party involved in a war zone. Such matters are best dealt with through contract, rules of engagement and local law. If local law is unable to police the activity of mercenaries in a meaningful sense, then self-regulation and internal discipline are second best. If that does not work, then ensure that they are subject to the laws of those who hired them.
War on Want is unable to think beyond the normal route of political control, UN transnational imposition and legislative fiat. Democratic control is a staging post on the road to the complete abolition of such companies. When one sees the allegations, one wonders what states, the icons of democratic justice, have not committed far worse crimes. And their press release gives the impression that their worst crime is to make money, an unpardonable sin for the ethical crusader:
Iraq has turned this commercial opportunity into a huge money spinner, with UK companies among those making a real killing. British companies increased profits from £320 million in 2003 to £1.8 billion in 2004. Estimates have suggested the total income for the private security sector worldwide has reached $80-100 billion a year. In 2006, UK company ArmorGroup saw revenues totalling $273 million. The company earned $133 million in Iraq that year. Aegis and ArmorGroup have won valuable contracts with the US and UK governments in recent months. Aegis has won a new contract with the Pentagon worth $475 million dollars over the next two years. The US Army has favoured the company for a second time, following its earlier $293 million contract from 2004. In 2007 ArmorGroup won the UK government’s £20 million annual contract for security services in Afghanistan. Ruth Tanner, senior campaigns officer at War on Want, said: “Despite increasing evidence on human rights abuse by private military companies in Iraq, the government has failed to act. This free for all cannot be allowed to continue. David Miliband must act on this mercenary crisis as an urgent priority.”
When companies appear unaccountable and their employees free to abuse whomever they like, then there is a role for law: but a charity rationalises this as an improvement in social justice or poverty to undertake a politicised crusade that will not aid anyone apart from the puffed up conscience of the socialist.
I am not sneering; I am genuinely asking.
For the last few months I have been education blogging. I’ve never been much good at working out site stats, and things are made harder by my education blog sharing its numbers, or all the ones that I see, with my personal blog. But, going only by how the comment rate has gone from zero to detectable, my education blog is now showing occasional but definite signs of life. I reckon that education blogging is rather like teaching. To begin with you often achieve very little, but if you stick at it, good things may eventually start happening.
In connection with my education blog, and in connection with the helping out that I am now doing once a week at one of the supplementary schools run by the think tank Civitas, I find myself asking: what is the point of learning maths? I entirely accept that there is a point, in fact many points. It’s just that I don’t know much about what these points are. Some of the boys at the supplementary school – two in particular spring to mind – strike me as showing real mathematical talent, at any rate compared to the others. What can I say to them that might encourage them – and encourage their parents to encourage them – to get every bit as far in maths as they can? What use is maths? For lots of people, especially for lots of teachers and lots of children, that is surely a question worth knowing answers to.
I don’t need to be convinced about the usefulness of arithmetic. People cheating you out of change in a shop, or loading you with debt obligations that you did not understand when you made the deal – working out floor areas and carpet costs – getting enough nails and screws and planks when you are DIYing about the house – just generally keeping track of work. I get all that. And, I find, I’m pretty good at teaching arithmetic to young boys and girls, partly because I do indeed understand how important it is.
But what about the kind of maths that really is maths, as opposed to mere arithmetic, with lots of complicated sorts of squiggles? What about infinite series, irrational numbers, non-Euclidian geometry, that kind of thing? I, sort of, vaguely, know that such things have all manner of practical and technological applications. But what are they? What practical use is the kind of maths you do at university? I hit my maths ceiling with a loud bump at school, half way through doing A levels and just when all the truly mathematical stuff got seriously started, and I never learned much even about what the practical uses of it all were, let alone how to do it.
I also get that maths has huge aesthetic appeal, and that it is worth studying and experiencing for the pure fun and the pure beauty of it all, just like the symphonies of Beethoven or the plays of Euripides.
But what are its real world applications? Please note that I am not asking how to teach maths, although I cannot of course stop people who want to comment about that doing so, and although I am interested in that also. No, here, I am specifically asking: why learn maths?
Occasional Samizdatista Michael Jennings works as a Something in the City, analysing things like technological trends. Not at all coincidentally he has a PhD in maths. He is the ideal sort of person to answer such questions, and he and I have fixed to record a conversation about the usefulness of mathematics later this week. But I am sure that a Samizdata comment thread on this subject would help us both, if only by helping me to ask some slightly smarter questions.
Some social critics go on about The Permissive Society, but what we are really facing is The Priggish Society currently being created by busybody politicians and other authority figures… Going out for a night in a bar with close friends is now denounced as “binge drinking”. Smoking an occasional joint means you are a “drug addict”.
– Alex Singleton
The inevitable has happened. The British government has nationalised Northern Rock, the stricken British mortgage lender and bank that got itself into terminal trouble last year as a result of its ambitious, nay, reckless policy of relying on funding itself through the short-term money market. When inter-bank rates spiked, as they did as a result of the credit crunch caused by the US sub-prime mortgage meltdown, Northern Rock suddenly found it impossible to go on funding its mortgage products. It was ruined.
As I have said several times before, the most logical, if painful step, would have been to let the company go bust; depositors would be protected if necessary, but otherwise, the company would be wound up. It would have been a painful, even traumatic example of how unwise lending policies can go unstuck. It would have served, for years to come, as a harsh reminder about the dangers of trying to run a bank without sufficient savings to back it up its lending. Instead, the government’s move to pick up the tab for Northern Rock’s problems will act, however marginally, to weaken the necessary harsh message that should come out of the Northern Rock fiasco.
Now, I know that Samizdata readers will not give a brass farthing about the EU angle, but a thought does occur to me, as it has to others: how on earth can the company be allowed to offer highly attractive savings rates, which are more attractive than those of some of its competitors, when Northern Rock is able to enjoy the status of a tax-funded company, when other, rival banks, such as Alliance & Leicester, are not? How, exactly, is the British government going to be able to square its actions with the single market of the EU?
Just asking.
You have nothing to lose but your place at the trough and a whole world to win!
One non-conservative Big Government Republican (George Bush Sr.) praising the ‘conservative’ credentials of another non-conservative Big Government Republican (John McCain). I assume I am not the only finding this more than a little absurd. These guys are not ‘neo-cons’, they are ‘non-cons’.
I was pleased to read that Allister Heath has been appointed as Editor of City AM, the free daily newspaper distributed in the City of London. The City is generally quite sound, but somehow I think the addition of a noted Hayekian libertarian as editor of this popular freesheet will help the City get even sounder.
Allister came on the scene in the 1990s when he co-founded the LSE Hayek Society. During the heyday of The European Journal, a Eurosceptic magazine, it was Allister who was editor. He says that when someone gave him a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, he found it full of things that resonated with him. For the past few years, he’s been working on The Business, firstly as Economics Editor, then Deputy Editor and finally as Editor, where he has been a consistent and effective critic of Gordon Brown’s economic policy.
But not green television the way you think. South African blogger 6000 is “not sure where this came from originally or if it’s true”, but he adds: “But you know, this is SA and people are nothing if not resourceful. It’s a cool story – I choose to believe.” Me too.
Spending fever has reached all walks of South African life. Here’s a fellow who lives in a squatter camp beyond Somerset West in Western Cape who now wants a television set – a new one, mind, not that second-hand thing in the pawn-shop window – so he buys one from the High Street furniture retailer.
But he’s back next day, saying the things keeps switching off just at the crucial moment. The shop checks it out and can find nothing wrong, but soon enough he’s back with the same complaint.
This time the shop sends out a technician to pop round to see what the problem is. When the technician gets there, he discovers our guy’s shack draws its electricity from a nearby traffic light, and that the TV only works when the light is green.
Good to know that almost everybody down there can afford to have “spending fever”, even if some prefer to economise on their electricity bills. 6000 has this as a mere scanned image of a newspaper report. I think it deserves the .html treatment.
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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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