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 news media are still buzzing about the resumption of Cold War era style patrols by their ancient bucket-of-bolts bombers (not that I have anything against old-but-good combat aircraft) right up to the edge of NATO airspace. But for me the most interesting news to come out of Russia these days is that far from being the Neanderthal thug he is often portrayed as being, Vlad had decided it is time to reach out to that segment of the Russian electorate he has always stayed away from…
“See my studdliness, Tovarich!” … he is now actively courting the Russian Gay Vote. Bless.
Let’s see if we can spot the flaky reasoning in this letter to The Times (of London), as prompted by a good(ish) article by Daniel Finkelstein today:
Writing as a parent and as one who stands to inherit a large sum, a far better way to reduce inter-generational inequality would be to set inheritance tax at 100% over a comparatively high threshold (e.g. £500K). Then the older generation would have a strong incentive to sell their large, expensive homes – increasing supply and making property more affordable for the young – and spend the money, boosting the economy, employment and wages. It would also have the benefit of forcing the children of the rich to make their own way in the world – they have enough advantages in life anyway.
First, the writer assumes as a matter of course that “inter-generational inequality” – however defined – is of itself a bad thing, a thing to be prevented by limits on any wealth bequeathed above a certain level. For this writer, he/she assumes that no person should have, in this case, an amount higher than say, £500,000. But why on earth should the state rule that people should be banned from receiving, as a gift, more than whatever some egalitarian thinks is the “right” amount? So the inheritor may not “deserve” it in some sense but so what? If a person does not deserve to inherit £1m, neither do his fellow citizens deserve to have that wealth evenly divided up among themselves, either. I think it was FA Hayek who pointed out that in talking of deserve, we talk of deserve in the eyes of someone else, like a father, boss or God who decides that Johnathan Pearce or AN Other “deserve” to receive X or Y out of the multitudes. But dumb luck in inheriting money or good looks or a high IQ is just that: luck. Luck is neither undeserved or deserved. Through aeons of time, we have evolved into human beings with things like opposable thumbs and relatively large brains. We did not “deserve” those, either, so does this mean we should hold ourselves back to benefit our less fortunate creatures?
→ Continue reading: The fallacies behind inheritance tax
People worried that Britain’s supposedly overcrowded, damp island will soon burst at the seams from rising population levels should always remember that although immigration has been high lately, so has the exodus of many people. Of course, if you are bothered about underlying trend, it is not exactly cause for celebration that so many Britons, especially if they are young and talented, want to get out of here as quickly as possible. To say that this thought has not occured to the Samizdata crew would be an understatement. (Although one might debate whether yours truly is young or even talented).
In the 1960s, there was talk about a “brain drain” from high-tax Britain. The situation is a little different now: I think the reason(s) for leaving are as much about the regulatory climate, the bloody awful weather, crime, the general ugliness and boorishness of Britain, and the better perceived better chances of raising a family. I am not saying that all these reasons are valid: countries like Australia or the US have their own problems and having been to the States regularly, I find it bizarre that that country is held up as a beacon of freedom sometimes, if only because some states like California seem hellbent on copying the worst regulatory excesses of Europe. But such caveats aside, this exodus ought to be an issue for Gordon Brown and the opposition to think about. If such large numbers of people want to leave, it is sending out a message.
Edward Paul Brown was a premature baby whose birth and death took place within minutes of each other on February 23rd 2007 in a lavatory in Queen’s Hospital, Romford.
Eighteen weeks into her pregnancy, his mother, Catherine Brown, was told that there was no amniotic fluid surrounding the baby in her womb. This meant that the baby’s chances of survival were minimal and her own life was threatened. Catherine Brown took the “devastating” decision to abort. Even those (such as I) who generally oppose abortion, will see this as a hard case – and I hope that any comments do not get sidetracked onto that issue.
So. We have a woman in hospital waiting for the procedure that will abort her baby, a child she had wanted to bear and raise. Not a pleasant situation at any time, but what followed next was disconcerting to read about even for those who have grown weary of NHS “war stories”.
I first saw this in the Times (Baby’s birth and death in lavatory of hospital with no trained staff), but there is a considerably more detailed account in This Is London (Mother forced to give birth alone in toilet of ‘flagship’ NHS hospital) (A very similar account appeared in the Daily Mail.)
Both headlines understate the peculiarly modern horror of what happened. The reader gets a picture of nurses trying to help, but out of their depth because Queen’s Hospital did not at that time have a proper maternity unit. That picture is wrong. The part of it that is wrong is the “trying to help.” The nurses declined to help.
→ Continue reading: Loss of nerve
No, not that Evil Empire – the other one!
Thanks to Nick M for providing the link; it was too good to leave languishing in this comments thread.
UPDATE: have I been had? I think it likely! Read comments for more details…
I am not a musician, but if I were a guitarist, I might fancy one of these. I like the one with the teeth.
(Via Gizmondo).
In case you are worried that all has been quiet on the party front, I am here to reassure you. The sad fact is that some of these parties require so much in the way of recovery – in the form of Sunday brunches, vast quantities of water, and time spent lying in a darkened room – that it can take a while to get to reporting on them.
Such was the case on a recent weekend, when our most fierce and lovely editor, Miss Adriana, celebrated her birthday with a few of her favorite ‘freedom fighters’.
Elena demonstrated the proper form for bum handling on an invisible model, despite no shortage of live volunteers
Perry always believed that two tarts were better than one
While Nick held the other blokes rapt with his best collectivist joke, Hugh Googled furiously to find out the punchline
You do NOT want to know what Elena spotted crawling out of my nose
The birthday girl let her t-shirt – and the plentiful booze – do the talking
Oh, you know those Samizdata parties: It is always hard to tell who you will end up sleeping with at the end of the night
More photos are here.
Go on, have a rich dessert…before Labour makes it illegal.
– Michael Jennings, Samizdata contributor and epicure, at dinner earlier this week
It looks like those advising and supporting Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, are determined to blackguard his prospective Tory opponent Boris Johnson by any means necessary.
First we had Doreen Lawrence (who has been cultivated by race-activists over the last decade to the point of co-option) wheeled out in The Guardian, to wave her son’s shroud and say:
Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multi-cultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city’s unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.
Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.
A classic piece of noughties argumentation: a champion victim finds him offensive. He should not be considered. But note also the visual metaphor: “look at themselves… look at him”.
This morning The Voice carried the news that: “London’s mayor Ken Livingstone will next week issue a formal apology for his city’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade”.
When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,
It may just be coincidence, but I prophesy that Ken will not be shy of inviting other mayoral candidates to do the same, hinting that they if they will not, it is because they are racists who secretly approve of slavery. We know where Boris stands. In the logical, historical, position. Nonetheless, officials from such organisations as Blink (the 1990 trust), and Operation Black Vote (which is supposed to be a non-partisan organisation encouraging electoral participation), have already described him as “a hardcore racist” and “bigoted”.
I suppose that we should not expect much better of professional agitators and their stooges. Boris is presented as a cartoon racist – using racial and class stereotypes. “Look! he’s blond, blue-eyed, with an Etonian accent” they are saying. “He’s cavalier about things right-on people feel strongly about, wickedly western, rational and white.”
That is a narrative calculated to appeal to their fellow quangocrats and positive-discriminators, beneficiaries of the Crimson Newt’s largesse, and to buttress them in their self-righteousness. But it also projects contemptuously low expectations of London’s black people in general, treating them as an ignorant client class who will lap up the most shameless propaganda. It is to be hoped London’s general public, black and white, will take the man as they find him, not as he is painted by an overt attempt to organise ‘racial loyalty’ at the polls worthy of the BNP.
If Londoners are urged vote for Boris or against him on the basis of the colour of their skins rather than their individual consciences, it isn’t Boris dividing London on racial grounds, it is those doing the urging. I do not know if they are, but the thought that a significant number Londoners might be sufficiently ghettoised to follow the call is thoroughly depressing.
No, I am not talking about the tiresome Lindsay Lohan and her ilk.
Perusing the morning papers, I could not help but wonder who will come under more fire: Kiera Knightley for glamorizing smoking (and looking absolutely stunning while she does so), or Sienna Miller for wearing what appears to be a keffiyeh as a bikini top?
Readers will recall the conniptions with which the UK Government and its media proxies met a Conservative policy paper from John Redwood (not actually a party policy) recommending reductions in red-tape.
The horror was Mr Redwood projected to reduce the compliance burden on business by approximately £14 billion. No cut in public spending was mentioned. Given the way bureaucracy works, removing inspections and forms does not necessarily mean reducing the number of inspectors and form-monitors.
Now comes some analysis that shows both sides were making a fuss about nothing. The way the current government operates, £14 billion is peanuts – roughly the annual rise in the direct cost to the general taxpayer and the regulatee of new bureaucracies. Lets not attempt to count compliance costs. No-one else has. But the Economic Research Council has been doing some sums.
As reported in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph (and appearing shortly on the ERC site):
[T]he cost of executive agencies, advisory bodies, independent monitoring boards and other quangos has mushroomed under New Labour. Spending on such agencies soared to £167.5billion in 2006, up from £24.1bn in 1998. Research revealed for the first time this weekend shows that over the past two years ministers have created 200 quangos.
Now there is a wrinkle here that seems to have been sidestepped by The Telegraph and the ERC: much of that increase is reclassification combined with expansion, particularly of chunks of the NHS. Reclassification is also a ratchet device – it puts bits of government machinery beyond ready scrutiny by calling them independent and lets them be pumped up independently of the departmental budget. But nonetheless it means the Tories, had they the nerve (and if they thought it would work as a political strategy), should have no difficulty in promising £50 billion in actual tax cuts, with the lifting of any compliance burden mere spin-off, rather than the main event. You can make your own list of favourites for culling from this document [3.5Mb pdf], though reading a 372-page list of official bodies may be a distressing experience.
It may also be funny, for those with a sick sense of humour. This body does not appear to spend anything, yet, though there is provision for £200,000 a year in state funding, and administering its existence and listing must cost something:
National Community Forum.
The Community Forum acts as a sounding board and critical friend to ministers and senior managers in DCLG. Members provide a ‘grass-roots’ perspective on the way neighbourhood renewal and other policies impact on local communities. Especially in relation to community participation and empowerment. They also provide valuable insights and information based in their first-hand experience of living and working in deprived neighbourhoods.
Established 2002. The NFC has not been ‘reviewed’ by the department, but they have just completed a two year evaluation which is about to be discussed by the board and will be placed on the website.
It is not that “you couldn’t make it up”. Most writers of fiction would be ashamed to invent anything so banal in its pointlessness. Whatever happened to mandarin prose?
What I find so infuriating about the situation in Southern Iraq is that it was all so avoidable, and by that I do not mean by not getting involved in the first place. Clearly I was wrong to assume that just because the British government did the right thing helping with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, they would do what was needed to actually secure victory in the aftermath and focus Britain’s resources on achieving military success against the Iranian based insurgents in their area of responsibility. Silly me.
What US generals see, however, is a close ally preparing to “cut and run”, leaving behind a city in the grip of a power struggle between Shia militias that could determine the fate of the Iraqi government and the country as a whole. With signs of the surge yielding tentative progress in Baghdad, but at the cost of many American lives, there could scarcely be a worse time for a parting of the ways. Yet the US military has no doubt, despite what Gordon Brown claims, that the pullout is being driven by “the political situation at home in the UK”.
A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus’s thinking said: “The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time – more than a year – they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.
“They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.
It is not like Britain lacks the troops to send in order to apply the needed force to Basra and its environs. What exactly are the 23,000 British soldiers defending Rheindahlen, Saxony and Westphalia from at the moment? It is extraordinary that the standard response to things getting rough militarily these days is not to reinforce but rather to cut back in-theatre thereby increasing the pressure of those troops left behind… hardly an approach calculated to bring success.
I thought the one thing the damn state was capable of was waging wars, particularly ones of its own choosing. If it cannot even do that, what the hell use is it? Even less than I thought, and that is saying something.
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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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