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]
|
The rioting in Lhasa seems to be continuing and now it has been reported that some discontent is boiling over elsewhere in Chinese occupied Tibet. Of course if the official death toll says:
only that 10 “innocent civilians” had died, mostly in fires set by rioters, and that 12 police officers had been seriously wounded.
It is safe to say it is probably ten times that, at least on the side of the resistors. It seems that Chinese colonists have also been involved in attacking Tibetans, so this does appear to be far from over. Sadly I cannot see China having any serious trouble remaining in control given the sheer size of their security apparatus.
So, all you activists out there who have made a career out of excoriating Israel, do you have anything to say about this?
Update: I received the following e-mail from a person called Lee Ming:
Why not China defend itself from separatisms? What if parts of Britain want to be separatists? China has rule this since long ago!
Some Chinese claims assert they have ruled Tibet since the 13th century (the Peace Treaty between Tibet and Britain in 1904 is strangely forgotten):
1. Chinese rule was always debatable
2. The historical claim is largely irrelevant. Scotland has been part of the UK since 1707 and it was in a loose de union with England since 1603… yet if a majority in Scotland vote to become independent now, do you think UKGov will send in the riot cops and troops? No. Hell, if a majority in Wessex want to go their own way, I quite like the idea of that too. There is nothing sacred about nation states.
The fact a majority of Tibetans want to be independent of China rather than live under colonial occupation is all the justification needed.
It was always a mistake to think that the demise of UK mortgage lender Northern Rock, entailing a massive bailout of the bank by the UK taxpayer, would be the only major example of a financial institution getting into dire trouble. Investors have woken up this morning to the news that JP Morgan, the blue-blooded US bank, has bought US bank Bear Stearns for less than a tenth of what Bear was worth, based on its share price, late on Friday. Wow. Bear Stearns, which has been building a fancy new European HQ in London’s Canary Wharf (that is a often a bad sign), was one of the earliest victims of the credit crunch. Two of its hedge funds were smashed last year by heavy losses linked to US mortgage-backed debt that has turned out to be worthless. The Fed has stepped into the JPMorgan/Bear Stearns deal with a £30 billion (don’t you just love these big round numbers?) funding facility. The dollar is in free-fall, which might be great for US exporters, not so marvellous for Germany, France or other countries. There is a whiff of panic in the air.
One of the more thoughtful, if sobering, analyses comes from The Times (of London) columnist William Rees-Mogg. He points out that once again, the late Milton Friedman has been proven correct: we have been through a period, since the 1990s, of rapid monetary growth. The inflationary impact of that growth had been temporarily masked in the High Street and the labour market by the deflationary effect of cheap goods from China and elsewhere. But for those who wanted to look hard enough, the warning signals were plenty: asset price bubbles in property, gold, antiques, fine wine, equities, as well as the frenzy of mergers and takeovers, much of which was funded by cheap debt, as well of course as the heavy lending to sub-prime borrowers in the US, Britain and elsewhere.
The trouble, however, is whether central banks have, or ever had, the weapons to control runaway lending. Consider this: for much of the 1990s and “Noughties”, Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, operated a zero-interest rate policy. Its official interest rate today is 0.5%. Let me repeat: 0.5%. As a result, speculators have borrowed vast amounts of money from Japan and reinvested the proceeds in places like Britain, where rates have been over 5%, or the US, or Switzerland, or Australia, New Zealand, and the euro zone. This is what is called the “carry trade”. These carry trades mean that to all intents and purposes, low-rate nations set the prevailing value of borrowing money.
Of course, old-style mercantilists might argue that this proves the need for exchange controls, capital controls and the like. I disagree, but I can understand the reactions. We live in a globalised market for money and credit, but without some sort of international “anchor” mechanism like the old gold standard, there is a dangerous vacumn in the system. Yes, I know all the arguments against tying currencies to gold (which is above $1,000 per ounce), but surely the finest minds of our economics profession need to figure out one of the key challenges of our time: how to ensure that the price of money is handled intelligently in today’s global market place.
Update: Megan McArdle has thoughts.
I like this:
For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.
“Us” being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.
To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.
Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!
Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you’re there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.
I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao’s argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).
That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.
Dallas City Hall has idled more than one-fourth of the 62 cameras that monitor busy intersections because many of them are failing to generate enough red-light-running fines to justify their operational costs, according to city documents.
– Dallas Morning News (with thanks to Engadget for picking up on the story)
Should the possession and/or distribution of child pornography be a crime in a free society?
It might seem strange that I would be saddened by the death of man who was supposed to have admired Lord Keynes, but Tony Dye knew a credit-money bubble when he saw one. What Tony Dye did not understand was politics. Every time he was certain that the crash must come, Alan Greenspan (and the mini me versions of him in charge of such institutions as the Bank of England) would just create more money to keep the credit boom going.
“But if he does that it will just make the crash worse when it does finally come” seemed to be Tony Dye’s position, and he was right.
However, he did not understand that political types (and Greenspan was certainly a political type) do not care about the long term.
“In the long run we are all dead” was the position of Lord Keyes, and Tony Dye is now dead. However, he did care about the long term – and the people who are left to live in it.
The latest great idea from ‘digital-strategy consultant’ Jim Griffin, who is advising the Recording Industry Association of America on new and innovative ways of rent seeking, is to propose a piracy surcharge on ISPs in the USA.
Of course the advantage of that is if all broadband users have to pay the music industry $5 per month, regardless of whether or not you actually download any music, legal or illegal, why bother promoting music at all? Who needs products when you can just force people to pay you regardless? Is it great that we have governments around the world who are in a position to actually try and do stuff like that?
On March 18th, it will be two years since the untimely death from cancer of Chris Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, bibiophile, and sceptic about many things, including the time spent (wasted?) on party politics. There is a plan to commemorate the academic approach which Chris always thought was a key to winning the battle of ideas against collectivism of all shades, with the Inaugural Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture, at the National Liberal Club, in London on Tuesday at 6.30pm.
The speaker is Professor David Myddelton, from Cranfield University. The title of the lecture is: “How to Cure Government Obesity,” which sounds like the sort of obesity we really ought to panic about.
Admission is free BUT ONLY if you contact Tim Evans, the LA’s president, by email: ———-. Numbers are limited and there are some drinks afterwards. I expect a recording will be made and linked to on either the LA blog or website. I shall certainly be there.
I especially miss the wicked sense of humour and the fact that my office is above an Amnesty International second-hand bookshop. It’s the sort of place Chris would have spent five minutes scanning ALL the shelves – even sport, in case a Tae-Kwondo manual showed up! Then he would have chatted for an hour with the Socialist or Liberal volunteers in the shop, discussing what he termed “the rape of the libraries” and (sincerely) pushing against climate change on progressive humanist grounds.
The toxic effects of collectivism rear its ugly Hydra-like heads in Finland, where the state wants to introduce a Chinese style ‘Internet Great Wall’ to stop people expressing political idea the state disapproves of. It also wants to prosecute Mikko Ellilä for the thought crime of expressing a dislike of multiculturalism.
It has been reported to me that Puumalainen said in a government press release in April that “racism” on the internet should be persecuted using the same methods as in the combat against child porn.Since all internet operators in Finland are required by law to block child porn websites, Puumalainen’s statement that “the same methods that have been successful in the combat against child porn should be implemented in weeding out racism on the internet as well” means that in Puumalainen’s opinion it ought to be possible for the government to establish a firewall that blocks all websites that Puumalainen accuses of racism.
In other words, Puumalainen says “racism” is a crime like child porn, and therefore “racist” websites such as blogs that mention crime statistics should be blocked by a governmental firewall.Mikko Puumalainen not only thinks that “racism” (such as data quoted from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice, or by the Interpol, or by the United Nations) should be a crime, but that citizens should not even be able to access websites that Ayatollah Puumalainen has declared to be heretic
And what ‘racist act’ did Mikko Ellilä commit that enraged the state?
Quotes from official crime statistics published by the Ministry of Justice undoubtedly “help maintain an anti-immigrationist political climate” because they prove that e.g. the Somalis commit more than 100 times more (over one hundred times more, as in, over 10,000% more) robberies per capita than the Finns do.
Yup, he quoted official crime statistics. Given that Finland has one of the highest rates of internet usage in the world, I hope this provokes a powerful backlash against the control freaks who run the country.
Recent large stories in Britain and the US keep the issue of whether prostitution should be legalised in the public eye. I think it should. The resignation this week of Eliot Spitzer, a US politician and former state prosecutor who quit after allegations about his use of prostitutes’ services – despite his prosecuting them in his day job – and the recent conviction of the British murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, convince me we should legalise it. The benefits are many:
People like Eliot Spitzer and other vicious, corrupt state officials would have fewer ways of annoying the rest of us, which is unquestionably a public good. Pimps who control prostitutes, or who attempt to do so, would have fewer opportunities to prey on such women. The spread of sexually transmitted disease would be reduced, if not eliminated because a client could shop around to find brothels that enforce hygiene checks and advertised themselves accordingly. If he caught a STD, the client could sue the brothel, just like a client can now sue a pizza joint if he or she gets food poisoning. And finally, because if an adult woman or man wants to sell sexual favours, that is their business, and no-one else’s, period.
John Derbyshire, the UK-born commentator who writes for the right wing US publication National Review, has this comment, which reminds me of why I am not a conservative:
Prostitution, like drug trafficking, is one of those zones where libertarianism bumps up against the realities of human nature.
Wrong. Prostitution and drug trafficking, which are both illegal, demonstrate perfectly the libertarian argument that if you ban trades between consenting adults (children are another matter), then criminals and the plain reckless will provide them, damaging society as a whole.
To a lover of liberty, it is hard to see why a woman shouldn’t sell her favors if she wants to. Trouble is, weak or dimwitted women end up in near-slavery to unscrupulous men, and I think there’s a legitimate public interest in not letting that happen.
Oh come on. One might as well say that liberty is only for intelligent, smart people who write for right-wing Washington magazines. Of course, unintelligent, feeble-minded people screw up, but the case for liberty is that people are better off if they are presumed to be best able to judge their own interests. The fact that some cannot do this does not overturn that point. Encouraging personal responsibility is good for society as a whole (sorry to use such a collectivist expression) even if it is true that some individuals are not good at taking such responsibility.
The best private sector solution would be a guild system, like the geishas had in old Japan. There’d be entry standards for the guild. Women would have to pass exams, and have some entertainment skills other than the obvious ones. The guild would police itself, expelling miscreants. Freelancing outside the guild could be under strong social disapproval, even made illegal.
He is talking about a form of trade union closed shop for prostitutes, sanctioned by law. But then what about the businesses that try to gouge concessions from politicians to get into these closed-shop deals? How would such ‘guilds’ be able to start up? What about registration fees? I can see a wonderful opportunity for political and business corruption here.
No, sometimes we ideologues have it right: the simplest, most radical option is also the most practical one. Even if you morally disapprove of prostitution – I do not – as a practical matter, legalising it makes lots of sense. Compared to what goes on down in most parliaments, prostitution is a noble calling.
Science is a matter of data, experiment and falsification. Nature has no interest whatever in your particular ‘ism’, whether it be liberal, conservative, left, social, commune, cannibal, left, or libertarian. The universe just is and it does not give a damn what you believe about it.
I happen to feel the science is on the side of human caused climate change, but that is not what I want to discuss. In fact, I am going to strongly discourage that particular debate to the point of removing comments arguing either “t’is!” or “No, t’isn’t!”
The discussion I would like to see is about the answers we as libertarians have if climate change is indeed real. Now if you believe as I do that it will happen, then obviously you have already been thinking about this issue. If I am wrong and nothing happens, then so much the better. If you believe there is no change, as I am sure many of you do, and you are wrong… the end result could be a complete loss of credibility and a delegitimization of everything we hold dear. The populace will not suffer gladly those who are wrong, especially if they have lost their homes and livelihoods.
Greenists, leftists, socialists and so forth have policies to ‘deal’ with the problem. In many cases these policies are simply their same old statist wish lists intellectually applied to the problem at hand. If change does occur, and most particularly if it occurs and appears or can be claimed to have been ameliorated by those policies they will use it against us.
This need not be the case. I am quite sure there are answers (and better ones) to all, or at least as much of the problem from our framework as from any other. Here is a range of scenarios for our discussion:
We get 1-2 degrees of overall warming.
We get between 1 and 10 meters of rise in mean sea level.
As wildcards, with low probability but not low enough probability:
Fresh water influx from the Greenland icecap modifies the salinity of the North Atlantic deep current and this pushes the Gulf stream southwards, adjusting Europe’s climate to match that of the same latitudes in Canada.
A major iceshelf in Antarctica ‘ungrounds’ and causes really major sea level rises of 30 meters or more over a period of a several decades.
The scenario would unfold over time as follows:
CO2 output hits its maximum value in the late 2020’s or early 2030’s and then begins to fall, despite continuing population increases, due to technological changes in primary energy and fuel production. I do not know whom the market winners will be, only that some technologies will supplant our current way of doing things.
Population peaks around 2060 and then tails off by several billion by the end of the century. This is based on a UN demographic projection whose trends have been roughly correct for as much of my life as I have been interested in such things.
The total CO2 and other factors causing more energy to be absorbed by the Earth climate system lag the CO2 input maximum by some time and begin to trail off around 2050.
No solar Maunder type minimum’s occur, ie, insolation of our planet remains pretty much constant over this century.
Most of the climate changes are neither dramatic nor sudden, although a change in the Gulf Stream might only take a few years if it did happen.
Some examples of the questions to ask are:
How would we handle the disastrous consequences for low lying nations? Would we have a class action suit of the form: ‘Individuals Residing in Bangladesh, Florida, The Netherlands, Pacific Islands et al v. Fossil Fuel Using Individuals’, for recompense for loss of real estate?
To what extent does amortization of property purchases write down the losses?
There would be winners and losers. For example, the US breadbasket would move northwards into Canada; some areas would become arid that were not; some areas would become tropical paradises that were not. As I have said before, complex non-linear systems can do just about anything when you pump energy into them. We will have to presume the results will be surprising and unpredictable. Some places might become hell hole swamps and others find themselves under glaciers. Mathematical chaos moves in strange ways. How should people deal with these unknowns?
Given this set of possible worlds, what do you feel are libertarian solutions which would turn more people towards our ideas than against them? If we do not have and sell our alternatives we are going to see policy decisions by others that we are not going to like one little bit, climate change or no climate change.
As the Boy Scouts say: Be Prepared!
Remember, this is not a debate about climate change. Such comments will be deleted to keep things focused. I want discussion to center on how free individuals would deal with the worst, should it happen.
All the London newspapers today are full of a new but familiar “report on strange people to the wonderful and efficient experts in the police” anti-terrorism advertisement.
I am a foreigner. I have five mobile phones. Readers are invited to speculate as to why this is (although it could just be that “I need communication”, or perhaps that I find that sitting in a bar sending text messages to myself relieves the monotony of life). I swap their SIMs around all the time, often in public places and for sinister reasons like “The battery ran out on my main phone and I still want to receive calls on that number”..
Also, I like to wander around London and other cities photographing things like bridges, container ports and other critical infrastructure.
When am I going to be reported? Will I be sent to Guantanamo? Will Brian be there too? Why the fuck are these people wasting my taxes like this?
Also, where did the “thousands” come from? If we are talking the whole world, it would be “billions”. If we are talking the UK it would be “tens of millions”. Statistics actually suggest that there are around seventy million active mobile phones in the UK. Given that that is ten million more than there are people in the national population, and given that there must be at least ten million people who realistically are too young to have one, there are at least twenty million suspicious phones in the UK.
Who knew the terrorism problem was this big?
|
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.
|
Recent Comments