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]
|
Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.
– Margaret Thatcher
It is hardly a secret I really really do not like Dave Cameron, but I was surprised when a chum of mine called me up to say Cameron was calling for a smaller state. I found this hard to believe and soon found this article called Cameron: People must be nicer to each other.
The Conservative leader accused Labour of treating Britons like children, saying the Government’s knee-jerk reaction to any problem was to bring in laws which often discouraged people from taking responsibility. He argued that measures such as anti-social behaviour orders had been counter-productive because they allowed people to abdicate responsibility for their actions.
[…]
He called for a “revolution in responsibility”, saying that the next Conservative government was not going to treat its citizens like children, promising “to solve every problem, respond to every incident, accident or report with a new initiative, regulation or law”. He insisted that a framework of incentives would prove more effective than regulations and laws. Mr Cameron promised to strengthen the family with the reform of a tax system that he claimed penalised couples who stayed together.
The fact the regulatory state is incredibly corrosive to civil society (in every sense of the phrase) should be self-evident to anyone claiming to be a conservative, but as Dave Cameron is not a conservative, in spite of leading a party called the Conservatives, I would not automatically assume he actually believes that. So you would think I would be pleased to finally see him saying something along these lines. In truth I burst out laughing when I read that article, not because I do not agree but because I do not believe him.
He has previously spent so much time telling us he can be trusted not to ‘do a Thatcher’ and how he intends to regulate our lives just as much as Blair’s Labour party, only ‘better’, why should his sudden enthusiasm for less regulation be believable? Simply put, he is not actually promising any such thing, not really.
The default position of all politicians is to pass laws in order to be seen to ‘do something’ and there is not a chance in hell that Dave Cameron, who is really just a political hack who sees power as an end in and of itself, will seek to actually roll back the state in any meaningful way and thereby deprive himself of patronage and political tools.
So of course the mask quickly slips…
He said a Conservative government would grant councils greater control of spending, while people should be encouraged to become more involved in the ownership and operation of their schools, public spaces, and social and environmental services.
Ah, so actually he is all in favour of the state doing stuff, he just wants it to be the local state rather than the central state. Sorry Dave, the only way you will stop damaging civil society is not by allowing a town council to spend the damn money, it is by not allowing any part of the state to spend so much money. A hell of lot less. There is just as much stupidity, greed and obsession with state control in town halls as there is in Westminster.
Somehow, I do not think this line of argument is going to work with my employer. I know this sounds harsh, but aspects of Greenery are starting to resemble a form of mental illness.
Be very suspicious when you hear the phrase “gap between rich and poor”. In the print version of the Evening Standard (I could not find a link to the article), Financial editor Anthony Hilton writes an article that makes a lot of rather questionable unspoken assumptions.
Gordon Brown will not change the rules that attract tax exiles to London. he is right to want the super-rich to stay but we must be aware the increasing gap between rich and poor
…and…
The British economy could be about to enjoy another 50-year boom but the major challenge remains the division of the spoils
…and…
The unwritten deal is that they pay little tax in return for adding to the general prosperity of the nation. It may be unfair to normal British taxpayers, it may be unfair competition from the perspective of foreign competitor countries, but it is pragmatic and it has worked
Although this article goes on to say that it is now the uncontested view that market economies are the only way to go, Anthony Hilton’s words are redolent with an assumed underpinning Marxist meta-context, to use Samizdata-speak. The fact that there is a gap between rich and poor is bad is a given to him. Why is it bad? He does not say because his meta-context takes it as a given that such a notion will be shared by his readers.
And that an economy is something that must be ‘divided as spoils’ is very strongly indicative of the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy. It suggests that for someone to get richer, someone else has to get poorer, which is perhaps the single most important underpinning notion behind almost every form of command based economics. Wealth is seen as something “we” have to divide, rather than something which is created.
Finally, for it to be “unfair” for someone else to have less of their money taken by the state even when that person can bring a quality of economic value beyond that of “normal British taxpayers”, seems to indicate that Anthony Hilton thinks the person being taxed more (in relative terms) should feel aggrieved against the person being taxed less rather than feeling aggrieved against the state which is taxing them more. Of course Anthony Hilton might not mean that but somehow I suspect he does.
Make no mistake, Anthony Hilton is not some poisonous Polly Toynbee style Stalinist as he does accept that market economies are the way to go, yet in almost everything he writes there is a large (and often unspoken) ‘but’ implicit in notion after notion… which is why I do not actually think he really does like the idea of market economies when it really comes down to it.
Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal?
The Balkans have been very quiet for what seems to be the longest time. Or, if not exactly quiet, then so overshadowed by other events that I had almost forgotten about them. Almost. But I have always regarded the region as an occasionally dormant volcano as opposed to a dead one.
In that context, this rather gloomy editorial from the Asia Times is worth reading:
When the outcome of a tragedy is known in advance, it finds ways of occurring earlier than expected. In this case, the fate of 100,000 Serbian Christians who remain in Kosovo may pre-empt the debate over Europe’s eventual absorption into the Muslim world.
The author makes no attempt to disguise his own sympathies so caveat lector.
I sometimes wonder how the last Balkan war would have played out without the NATO (read American) intervention. Very differently I suspect. In the event of another eruption, does the USA have the available resources and sufficient political will to perform an encore?
Really, if The Economist is going to opine on this sort of thing, its writers need to know something on the subject.
– Glenn Reynolds
For finance geeks and stock market punters, here is an article about the growing use of computer programmes to trade the equity, bond and other markets. Even as early as 1987, when equities fell dramatically – was it really nearly 20 year ago? – I vaguely recall reference to ‘programme-trading’, a process whereby orders to buy or sell a bunch of stocks was automated. Banks and hedge funds now use what are called algorithmic trading systems, which, in plain English, make use of recognisable patterns of behaviour that can be expressed mathematically in order to give out ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ signals in a market, spot trends, etc.
The usual worriers, not all of them anti-market people, may fret that all this mathematical wizardry, aided by the powers of modern computing, will make markets dangerously volatile, but as Iain Dey’s Telegraph article suggests, this does not appear to be the case. In recent years, in fact, global equity and bond markets have been pretty calm, although punctuated by the occasional sharp selloff, as happened in late February and early March. The last really big blowup was when Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1998, triggering the meltdown of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund. When last year the fund Amranth nearly collapsed in the natural gas market, it hardly caused a wider ripple.
In fact, contrary to what the Will Huttons of this world might have us believe, the growing use of financial derivatives to offload risks seems to be making markets more, not less, able to deal with risk and ultimately, makes the whole financial system safer. That is not, of course to say that all is well. It is not. In Britain, a profligate government could yet put the market into a spin if the inflation problem gets worse (UK retail price inflation is nearly at 5%). House prices could, if interest rates rise as expected, take a nasty fallback. So there are gremlins in the systems. But the blame, as usual, should be pinned on the real culprits, and not computers or strange-sounding things like collateralised debt obligations.
Of course, this also explains why some of the best science graduates and post-graduates now work in the City, rather than making space rockets. Money talks.
(I have corrected the spelling of Iain Dey).
I still think of myself as an environmentalist. Almost everyone is interested in their living conditions. So I hope in that sense you do, too.
My problem with greenery is that I also think. Something that many greens have given up decades past. It was apparent to me even 20 years ago, that most were adapting their understanding of the problems – and indeed inventing problems – to match their prefabricated concept of a good society. I tried to fix that. I failed.
There are lots of exceptions, and I still have a lot of time for those who hang on to rationality. But unfortunately they tend to feel too much loyalty to the Green brand to distinguish themselves from it. Maybe this is good politics, but I think it is bad policy. Fostering craziness leads to the growth of craziness.
Here is a profession of the true, mad, faith from The Ecologist, a magazine that has otherwise been gently drifting from the hard-core towards the mainstream since Zac Goldsmith took over from his late uncle. ‘Cassandra’ writes:
I listened [to Julian Morris at a Conservative Party climate change seminar] in a sort of daze of disbelief that anyone professing to profess anything at all in matters academic could be so divorced from the realities around him and so blind as to where we are heading.
The rich countries have reached their current unsteady and unsustainable apex of ‘development’ by bankrupting our posterity of basic resources such as oil; by perpetrating crimes against the natural world in terms of species poisoning and elimination, of soil and oceanic degradation that will beggar humanity for generations; by promoting the biological hoodlumism of global warming; and by disintegrating our local community structures, the oldest social unit in all human history, to such a degree that our prisons and hospitals are full to overflowing and figures for such ills as cancer, venereal infections, juvenile behaviour disorders and psychotic forms of family breakdown are climbing to ever higher levels as millions resort increasingly to drugs and opiates to relieve the stresses all this wonderful development is imposing on them.
And so on, in a column so rich in lunacy as to defy fisking. Cancer and sexually transmitted disease are caused by wealth. Burning oil is “biological hoodlumism” but nonetheless it is a basic resource of which we are short. The corollary: “we should be embarking on a massive programme of de-industrialisation”.
My question for such anti-humanist zealots is the same logical positivist one that I have for the religious fundamentalists: is there any conceivable evidence from which you would not derive the same conclusions? The mythic pseudonym should be Procrustes, not Cassandra.
I am sure many of you have heard Carla Howell’s song “How Could I Live Without Filing Taxes”. Well, now she has a music video!
“My word, I’m not even a hundred yet.” The last line of Robert A. Heinlein’s masterpiece – arguably his finest book – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Much has been written about the science fiction maestro. Well, a lot is going to be said and written about the man at the upcoming conference to mark the centenary of his birth. The guest-list is pretty damn impressive, including one of America’s hot science fiction talents, John Scalzi. It seems sadly ironic that Heinlein, a man who wrote memorably about longevity and characters like Lazarus Long, is not still with us.
But his ideas and wonderful stories most decidedly are.
As sporting competitions go, it may not be one of the most visually enthralling, but the America’s Cup yachting race festival – held this year in Valencia in Spain – has to be up there as one of the most prestigious and oldest. Started in Victorian Britain, the prize to win he massive trophy got its name from the fact that, for more than 150 years or so, America managed to win the series of race matches without a break until, in 1983, the Australian-backed team led by skipper John Bertrand beat a yacht helmed by legendary US race maestro Dennis Conner.
I love the shape and design of 12-metre yachts, and the J-class yachts that were raced in the 1920s and 1930s are arguably some of the most beautiful creations to be struck from the hand of man. I often find that people who do not know much about sailing like to put prints of J-Class vessels on their walls. I think there is something about the aesthetic of such a racing boat that appeals to us in much the same way that a sleek aircraft does. In many respects the design of a modern yacht has a lot in common with the design of aircraft, so perhaps it is not surprising that some of the top aircraft designers, such as Thomas Sopwith, were keen sailors too.
Largely due to the lack of time and of course money, I do not do as much sailing as in my younger days but I hope to get in some time afloat later this year, possibly including the race around the Isle of Wight, part of the Cowes Week yatchting series. I always seem to return from a yachting holiday or race feeling absolutely knackered but also refreshed by getting completely away from the office. You love it or you hate it. For me, sailing is as addictive as nicotine or booze. I intend to take the shore-based Yachtmaster navigation course this winter and eventually go for the full ticket.
Anyway, I will be interested to see if the USA can win back the America’s Cup trophy this year. I do not think Britain stands much of a chance, unless some rich-as-Croesus character decides to fund a serious challenge for the trophy.
|
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