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.
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– says former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in a Guardian article called “The EU surrendered to Trump over trade tariffs – now it’s in danger of capitulating again”.
It is stirring stuff:
How long are we, citizens of the EU, going to tolerate these threats? Submit to those who want to impose their rules, their laws, their deadlines on us? Surrender to those who now presume to dictate our fundamental democratic and moral principles, our rules for how we live together and even how we protect our own children online? Why and in whose name would we agree to cast aside our twin digital regulations, the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament?
and
Because regulating the information space is not optional: it is a sine qua non for turning the narrow mercantile logic of a few into a genuine contribution towards human progress and the common good.
Throughout history, humanity has managed to regulate its territorial, maritime and airspace. This is the prerogative of sovereign states. It is the essence of sovereignty itself. To renounce, today, the task of regulating the fourth domain – the digital space – by leaving it to a handful of private actors would be a historic abdication of the public sphere, of political will, of the democratic promise.
Sorry, what promise was this? I’ve heard of “the social contract”. Discussion of that has been around for centuries. I’ve heard of “the military compact”, which in a British context is a phrase used to describe the obligations of the government towards soldiers in exchange for them risking their lives on its behalf. However my self-education in political theory did not include this apparently well-known promise made to its citizens by every democratic state worthy of the name that it would interpose itself between them and the horror of seeing Elon Musk interview Donald Trump on Twitter.
Regular readers will recall that Commissioner Breton was a leading promoter of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which has good reason to be described as “the single greatest threat to free speech in Europe”.
There are a lot of people out there who have it in for Nigel Farage. Most are on the left but a growing number are on the right. The thing is, as far as I am aware there is no great ideological difference between Farage and his right-wing critics. So, what’s going on?
If we are looking for clues we could do a lot worse than look at some of his bust-ups. Rupert Lowe is a recent example. But you have also got Ben Habib, Douglas Carswell and – if you go back far enough – Alan Sked, the founder of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
My theory is that Farage is incredibly jealous of his position. If he detects a threat to it – real or imagined – his instinct is to react with fury, to remove the threat as completely and as loudly as possible and damn the consequences.
That is not to say that Farage is a one-man band. Clearly he has had a very effective working relationship with Richard Tice over the years. I suspect that Tice knows that he could not do what Farage does. And I suspect that Farage knows that he knows.
I have some sympathy with Farage. The prospects for UKIP did not look great in the early 1990s. Or for a long time to come. But Farage stuck at it. It was a lonely existence. He suffered all that – well, a lot of what – the establishment could throw at him and in the Brexit referendum – with a bit of help – humiliated them. And now, he is on the cusp of becoming Prime Minister. And some people think that they can take it away from him when it is he, Farage, that’s done all the bloody work!
There are consequences of Farage’s jealousy. The upside is that Reform does not have to worry about factional in-fighting. There is only one faction, only one opinion that matters: Farage’s. The downside is that it is Stalinist in nature. No one is allowed to disagree. Anyone who attracts the attention of the media or Hope Not Hate – the supposedly anti-racist pressure group – is out. In my local branch the chairman was recently removed for “something” – we were never quite sure what. And then he was brought back. And then fired again. And then brought back.
What it means is that talent is being driven away. This could be really quite serious. Dominic Cummings – former advisor to Boris Johnson – and someone I think is well worth listening to has expressed his scepticism of the effectiveness of “one man and an iPhone” when dealing with an institution as vast and hostile as the British government.
It may be the case that Farage has been listening to us and the plan is to close down vast parts of the British state: education, NHS, Ofcom, FCA. That would make the government more manageable. But I think that unlikely, in which case Farage will be able to do very little given that – due to the size of the task – he will have to delegate to people who have been promoted on account of loyalty rather than ability.
It may be the case that we have to look to Farage’s successors on the right. The good news is that there will be plenty of them.
I came across this interview with US academic Cass Sunstein, whose views on behaviouralism – including the area known as “behavioural economics”, have been immensely influential on governments in the past 25 years or so.
The idea of “nudging” people via policies to doing certain things (auto-enrolment in savings for retirement, messaging about the dangers of certain lifestyles, etc) has become a default piece of wisdom. It accords with the tendency of a managerialist political class that sees the wider population as only partially rationally self-interested. Sunstein, as shown in this video (conducted by the Hoover Institution in the US) notes how he disagreed with the Chicago-based economics folk such as Nobel Prize winner George Stigler and others about the idea of rational expectations. The behavioural school thinks that human motivation is not like that; in the financial services space, for instance, there is a school of thought known as behavioural finance that looks at crowd behaviour in times of stock market booms, busts, etc. And there are temptations to try and “fix” these behaviours.
I see a few dangers, and maybe Sunstein does too now (it is worth seeing the whole video). For example, it is easy to see how a government, even if democratic and accountable, can grow into a monster if driven by even well-meaning people that think that people aren’t necessarily fully rational, and need to be nudged, or guided, into doing the “right thing”.
This helps explain, in some ways, why the “administrative state” is what it is. It would not have got so big had it been a clearly evil project. Most people who drive all these changes and programmes think they are doing the right thing. Some might be bad but most aren’t. And yet here we are, with a bloated set of governments in the West, with skyrocketing debt and all the rest of it.
I think a major flaw in behavioural economics is the hubris of the “nudge” advocates about how they think they can handle all this. And as we have seen, politicians who lean towards tax-and-spend policies love some of these ideas because they can sit alongside what they want to do anyway. I am not even sure it makes sense to describe these as “liberal” because some of this “nudge” stuff does not seem to accord with ideas about treating people as individuals who need to be held accountable for their actions.
It is arguable that the “nudge” crowd hew to a form of soft determinism, or maybe “soft paternalism” – the notion that we are not really volitional creatures with agency, but buffeted by internal and external forces, and often emotional first, rational second. But even if that latter point is true, a rational person with choice-making capacity can realise that he or she is prone to making unwise/foolish choices, and like Odysseus who lashed himself to a mast to avoid being tempted by the Sirens, adopt rules and protocols to not screw up. (I know an alcoholic who avoids parties and certain events to avoid getting into trouble, to give one example. Another might be a stockbroker who turns off the noise of the daily news and makes better investment decisions over the long run.)
Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and all that.
Ray Sanders has produced solid evidence that suggests the Met Office is inventing temperature data that it is using for political Net Zero purposes. Claiming his thorough, well documented investigations are “vexatious” will no longer wash. It must reply with realistic explanations and evidence of its own to retain public trust in its work.
– Chris Morrison
I used to say “Other than weather reports, don’t believe anything the media says without looking at multiple sources”… well even the weather reports are deeply suspect now.
For Farage and Reform, Musk’s attack is sunlight, the best disinfectant. It clarifies the divide: Reform as a broad church for disillusioned patriots, not a niche for extremists.
– Gawain Towler (£)
These are not smart taxes in a service economy that desperately needs to increase productivity. We need a tax policy that encourages people to work longer hours, in the highest-paying, private sector jobs they can find. We need a tax policy that encourages money to move from unproductive assets to more productive investments, which hopefully make a profit and pay dividends. We need a tax policy that enables small and medium-sized businesses to continue to operate, employ people and pay taxes. We need a tax policy that encourages the global wealthy to live in the UK and spend their money here.
Worst still, besides risking the bulk of UK taxes by discouraging businesses and driving the rich out of the country, these tax increases still aren’t enough to pay for the Government’s additional spending. Which brings us back to the opening paragraph of this essay: A doom loop occurs when government policy reduces economic activity by over-taxing it, over-regulating it, or allowing unconnected third parties to stifle it with litigation. Lower economic activity lowers tax revenue, which in turn causes a debt spiral if the government can’t or won’t cut spending, which leads to increased debt and higher debt costs. In the 2024/25 financial year, the UK public sector net debt was £2.8 trillion, equivalent to 95.1% of GDP. Public sector net borrowing was £151.9 billion in 2024/25, £20.7 billion higher than the previous year and equal to 5.3% of GDP, up from 4.8% in the financial year 2023/24.
– Catherine McBride
“Mr. Merz is doing what no one else in the top ranks of Western politics seems willing to do, which is broach the fundamental dilemma of the modern West. Nations have built welfare and entitlement states that are so large they have outstripped the ability of slow-growing economies to pay for them. Yet because the entitlement cushion is so broad and reaches deep into the middle class, it has become nearly impossible to reform.
This is true among conventional politicians of the left and right. But it’s also true of the supposed radicals of the populist right. From Marine Le Pen in France to the U.K.’s Nigel Farage, the AfD in Germany and Donald Trump, the populists dodge difficult reforms of the broken welfare state.”
– Wall Street Journal ($) editorial, reflecting on the recent statements on the German welfare state by the country’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz.
What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised.
– Gawain Towler
Thousands upon thousands of ULEZ cameras have been destroyed by the Bladerunners (way more than 5,000 last year alone)
“We know that the Online Safety Act (OSA) is a disaster. The group it is billed as protecting, children and young people, is not only rebellious: it is precisely the class most adept at using VPNs and other devices to circumvent it. And this is even before you get to the unintended consequences. The more we try to regulate the semi-respectable internet sites out there, the more we push thrill-seeking young people to the darkest and most frightening corners of cyberspace, where they can suffer serious harm. Furthermore, the greater the pressure on the young to sign up to dodgy free VPNs, the greater the likelihood of their later suffering trolling and identity theft. Some protection.”
– Andrew Tettenborn
Following from my post of yesterday about the attacks on inheritance, and attitudes around equality more generally, I took another look at the Lewis Goodall attack on inheritance. Goodall, a journalist, argues that he is in favour of capitalism – he wants to cut income taxes – and therefore he is not just some malcontent Leftie who wants to hit people on the head with tax.
There is also a sort of intergenerational justice argument going on here. Quantitative easing and other forces have inflated asset values; Boomers have, to some extent, enjoyed final-salary pensions and been able to retire in their early 60s, if not before. Most Gen X (that includes me), Millennials and the Zs will have to work for longer. (Given hopefully rising healthspans, that might not be a bad thing, however.) True, those who were young adults in the 50s, such as my Dad, had to do military service, and there were other nasties to deal with that we younger adults did not have to handle. But still, there’s a sense of grievance that those who had “never had it so good” got to have the best of times, and their offspring have got the dirtier end of the stick. That’s certainly part of what is driving some of this anti-wealth/inheritance narrative.
Switching gears here, there are structures that people have, over the centuries, sought to form to stop inheritors becoming obnoxious and lazy, and also to hold families together so that they don’t fall out, as in the HBO series, Succession.)
For years, in my day job, I have wrestled with the trend of a multi-trillion dollar/equivalent transfer of wealth from the Baby Boomer generation. In the wealth management sector, particularly in the US, there’s a whole field of advisory work that goes on to help guide ultra-wealthy families about how not to spoil their children. The debate is often framed in the question of “how much is too much?” in transferring wealth.
We have seen the rise, in their thousands, of what are called family offices. These are structures – operating around the world – that act as a sort of trusted point of control for a family’s private wealth. FOs operate in North America, continental Europe, the UK, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other developed countries. (I predict a big expansion in India, as many businesses there are family-owned.)
Sometimes FOs emerge from the executive suite of a family-run firm; they run the liquid wealth of a family, and that becomes a sole focus once a firm is sold or floated on a market. FOs are designed to hold families together – they even have their own “constitutions” and governing procedures – and create a sort of structure through which families handle payments to different members, run investments, deal with philanthropy, personal and cybersecurity, bill payments, and more. Once obscure, the family office industry is a large, multi-trillion sector. The original FO was, arguably, founded by J D Rockefeller, the oil tycoon. Today, the likes of Michael Dell and Bill Gates have them, as do the founders of Google, the governing family of Walmart, Home Depot, shipping dynasties in Denmark, Mittlestand firms in Germany, and many more. (Germany has many family offices, most of which are obscure.) Families that are far less wealthy than the foregoing can create family offices, although they aren’t economically efficient to run if assets under management go under $100 million.
Another structure for we lesser mortals is the trust. These are creatures of the English Common Law, and are extensive in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and biggest of all, the US.
Trusts remain an incredibly useful tool for ensuring orderly transfer/control of assets by families. If people such as Lewis Goodall are worried that inheritors become spoiled brats and lose a work ethic (if that is his genuine concern, it is a fair one to have), then trusts can, or could, be structured so that a beneficiary only receives payouts from it if certain terms and conditions are met.
Governments sometimes try and clip the wings of trusts. In 2006, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown moved against the trusts sector, on the specific issue of inheritance. The use of trusts in the UK has, on balance, shrunk, but they retain their uses.
If people fear that inheritance saps the ambition and energy of inheritors, then trusts and other structures can be set up by parents and others to avoid that from happening. In a way, this sort of discussion is not so different from those that come with Universal Basic Income – what happens if we turn the entire working-age public into a bunch of loafers?
To some extent, considering the impact of inheritance on inheritors – or UBI recipients – are empirical questions, based on an understanding of incentives, behavioural issues, values and so on. The morality of it is a different one. UBI is funded via tax – a coercive move of money from the individual to the State. Inheritors of legitimately acquired wealth are receiving something that was legitimately held and transferred by consent of the transferrer.
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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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