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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It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right
– Winston S. Churchill
Brian Linse ponders the nature of monopoly and capitalism on his blog AintNoBadDude. Rather than answer him directly, I will give him my modern Austrian school economics influenced perspective on the nature of markets and monopoly.
The nature of modern capitalism is significantly different to that of, say, capitalism in the 19th century. The vastly enhanced flow of information and the global nature of enormous pools of fungible capital means that market mechanisms that worked sporadically in years past now work more smoothly and with tidal inevitability when allowed to. The larger the pool of possible market entrants and participants, the more liquid and inexorable the markets become.
Thus paradoxically, there is only one method by which monopoly and oligopoly can really occur for extended periods in a ‘harmful’ form, and that is in market niches protected from globalization. That is why Microsoft is so obviously only a transient ‘problem’ rather than a market ‘failure’ as its market position is not the result of adapting to regulation and protection. As big as Microsoft is, it is dwarfed by the pool of global capital looking for alternative uses. There is a good reason that in spite of its huge market share that MS products are really not that expensive. New entrants are impossible to keep out: if MS were to create ‘excessive’ profit margins, they would be quickly faced with hordes of new competitors as the software market does not require huge start up costs to enter. Thus the MS ‘monopoly’ is of little concern in reality. Apple products are actually more expensive and yet no one is accusing them of abusing a monopolist position. The reasons for that are not so hard to understand. In essence, the only way MS can remain a near monopoly is by not acting like a monopolist. Multi-billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt thought he was ‘bigger than the market’ and it ate him alive because he was trying to mess with a truly global commodity market. Bill Gates is under no such illusions.
It is ironic that left wingers and protectionist paleo-conservatives who fret about ‘monopolists’ are the same people who create the conditions for them to flourish by hampering the progress of continuing to globalize ownership, and by raising the cost of market entry with vast teetering towers of regulations designed to prevent precisely what they are in fact enabling. Capitalist ‘conspiracies’ that the left are so fond of fretting about inevitably come to nothing if the pool of capital and potential entrants is larger than the ‘clique of conspirators’ can in reality control, which in the case of truly global markets is the norm rather than the exception.
Sky and Telescope is not where one would normally expect an editorial on government waste. Mostly it covers more important issues like “what is the fastest way to cool down my Newtonian’s primary mirror?” or “are Type II supernovae assymetric?” But if there is one topic that unites astronomers of all persuasions from the most casual amateur to the greyest Chaired professional, it is science literacy. So it should not be surprising when The Boston Globe announced “Heavens smile on astrology school: It’s accredited”(1) your average astronomer was mildly upset, as in “I was mildly upset the wife emptied the house and took my dog and pickup truck and the good Dobsonian when she walked out on me”.
I first heard of this yesterday morning when I read Dr. Rick Feinberg’s scathing January 2002 editorial on the subject. He did a bit of research into the story. It all just gets better. Not only did the The Astrological Institute of Scottsdale, Arizona become accredited by the US Department of Education in August 2001; the Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences in Seattle, Washington, was granted the right to award Batchelor’s and Master’s degrees in June 2001. Now I have nothing against people who want to throw their own money away on supernatural claptrap; but as Dr Feinberg points out federal grants and loans can be awarded to students to help pay tuition. That’s right. All of you in America are now paying taxes to ensure your local gypsy fortune teller has a Diploma hung on her wall.
I strongly agree with Dr. Feinberg’s suggestion that Americans call the Office of the Inspector General’s hotline for fraud, waste, and abuse involving federal student aid funds. The number is: 1-800-MIS-USED (1-800-647-8733) or email at oig.hotline@ed.gov
(1)The article is no longer available on line at the Boston Globe, but a copy may be found posted here if you search well down the page.
How appropriate that, with the end of January almost upon us, and so many are struggling to complete their tax returns, we get a little lift from the EU Commission who have hinted that they may relieve of this onerous duty. Instead, it is suggested that, in future, we simply remit our hard-earned direct to Brussels
What I like is the assertion that this new idea appears in a confidential letter sent by EU Commissioner, Michaele Schreyer, to her fellow EU Commissioners. Yes, the letter was so confidential that it has been splashed all over the front page of the EU Observer. As if we have been treated to a tantalising glimpse of the goings-on behind the Chocolate Curtain
Nothing of the sort. This is an administrative trick. The decision by the EU to tax direct has already been made and this little pantomime is to test public and media response. The European equivalent of running it up the flagpole and seeing if anybody salutes (or balks)
But what matter really? Balk away. Its on the cards regardless
Given that ‘Samizdata Illuminatus’ has been posting Churchill quotes lately, it is only matter of time before someone else thinks up this Churchillian reference:
The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, bloggery and the lash.
Sorry.
I’m new to bloggery, so please everyone bear with me while I get the hang of it.
Guns. Much is made by libertarians of mass civilian gun ownership, and this does matter, especially politically. But with crime, the mere right of civilians to own a gun, even if most of us choose not to exercise that right, is, I surmise, critical.
If you are thinking of becoming a career criminal, then the difference between a world in which just a few civilians are weird enough to own guns and crazy enough to use them against intruders, and one in which such people are so rare as to be for all practical purposes non-existent… is all the difference. It’s the difference between being shot on about your hundredth robbing expedition (i.e. quite soon), and not being shot ever.
The difference between half the population being armed and all of it being armed is, in contrast, not much of a difference. So, you get to do about one unmolested robbery before the hospital or the morgue beckons, instead of no robberies at all. Not a big distinction.
I sense that we in Britain have perhaps – what with all the new restrictions following the Dunblane massacre – moved from the first of these two gun-worlds to the second.
For decades, the number of robberies you could hope to get away with before getting seriously hurt has been climbing steadily, but you still had to be very short-sighted to become a robber. That didn’t stop everyone, but it did stop most. Gun wimps like me could live safe from most potential robbers, because the robbers didn’t know for sure that we were all gun wimps.
Now, everyone’s a gun wimp. Now, I surmise, robbers can reasonably hope to rob for life.
I have a personal stake in this. On the radio a couple of years ago I announced that there was a big increase in violent crime under way, not because I knew this to be true, but because for the sake of my argument I needed it to be true. (I wasn’t expecting a gun argument, and hadn’t been attending to recent crime news properly.) Sadly, it seems that I was right.
I was watching the news on the television this afternoon when Bono, the Irish singer for U2 came on to opine on issues of third world debt, AIDS and trade, with reference to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Blantyre, Malawi.
For one brief shining moment I thought that a universal law of thermodynamics (that when entertainers talk about anything other than the entertainment business, their voices can be heard to emanate from their posteriors) was about to be spectacularly falsified. He remarked that it was appalling that Africans are denied access to US and EU markets due to disgraceful protectionist measures and how this was crippling the entire continents’ ability to develop economically… well, that certainly made me sit up: a singer who actually understands real world economics and genuine liberty? Surely not!
Alas cruel reality quickly reasserted itself. He then went on to rail against how banks were putting ‘profits before people’ because of the crippling levels of debt in Africa. Naturally he did not mention that this debt was not forced on Africa’s governments at gunpoint but was freely entered into by the purported leaders of various African nations. Somehow the actions of African borrowers of money result in Western banks ‘putting profits before people’. Interesting. I wonder if Bono also takes a neo-colonialist view that as African leaders are presumably not competent to make sound economic decisions, they should not be allowed to borrow money in the first place? Just curious.
And then, Bono deliverers the rhetorical coup de grace designed to impress upon the Western viewers how urgent the situation is:
After September 11, people cannot just ignore Africa any more. This is a problem that must be dealt with now by America and the West
Now please, will someone out there correct me if I am mistaken, but I was not aware that anyone from Zambia or Congo or Nigeria or Burundi or Mozambique or Senegal or Zimbabwe or Angola or Ghana had hijacked some American airliners and crashed them in to the Pentagon and World Trade Centre towers. What the hell does September 11th have to do with African poverty?
Perhaps someone should point out to Bono that the way the US responded to September 11th was not to shower Afghanistan with largess but with an earth shaking hail of 2000 lbs laser guided bombs and the forceful destruction of the Taliban government.
Then again…
…given that most of Africa’s economic problems are clearly derived from government malfeasance, perhaps my fleeting first impression of Bono as an astute observer was correct after all and that is indeed what he wants for Africa’s ghastly kleptocratic regimes: obliterate most of Africa’s governments, remove all Western trade barriers to African goods and services, declare victory and then go home to leave the formerly oppressed African man-in-the-street to get on with their lives unhindered by the likes of Robert Mugabe or Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
Cool, that works for me.
I’ve had it on my mind recently to check out the website of Amnesty International. I do recall clearly that, when I was a student, it was an organisation so esteemed that it was generally held to be the very highest arbiter of human affairs among anybody who was anybody. Why, the mere utterance of its name was sufficient to bring on paroxysms of crippling guilt and po-faced righteousness in equal measure
So I moseyed along to their website to see what they had to say for themselves these days, and guess what I found? Well, according to Amnesty the way to ‘Stop the Terror’ is to abolish the trade in small arms.
They’d be better off trying to stop the proliferation of the word sustainable which pops up all over their website like a plague
Now, in fairness to them, they do highlight the fact that small arms are used by tyrannical governments, guerillas and criminals to bully and kill innocent civilians but what they speciously fail to realise is that abolishing the means of self-defence is not the way to discourage them
Oh and there’s a lot of other guff about the diamond trade being (shock, horror) unregulated and a general lamentation about the slow progress of World Government under the strict auspices of the UN (which they clearly worship). In short it is more or less everything that can be expected from your average post-modernist left-wing lobby group
Of course, there is nothing wrong, indeed there is everything right, with campaigning against government abuse and torture of citizens but there is a great deal wrong with their promotion of ‘entitlements’ as ‘rights’ and with their underlying assumption that all human life can be preserved and sustained by writing lots of noble things on lots of bits of paper and entrusting their stewardship to diverse grand-sounding conventions and bureaucracies. Some people don’t quite get it. These guys don’t get it at all
Far from being a ‘Candle in the Darkness’, Amnesty International is just another one of those organisations that know everything about human rights and nothing at all about human liberties
Some strange (and over optimistic) search engine hit on the Samizdata over the last week:
via Google: conspiracy+code+illuminatus
via Lycos: naked+Claudia+Christian
via Google: cat+sex+libertarian
via Yahoo: balkan+murder
via Lycos: Natalija+Radic+naked
via Yahoo: hawala+tax+computer
via Google: London+prostitution
via Yahoo: guns+wild+Italian
via Yahoo: cypherpunk+libertarian
via Yahoo: elephant+economics
I must point out that my rule of life prescribes as an absolute sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be, during all meals and in the intervals between them
– Winston S. Churchill, on the occasion of lunch with Ibn Saud, King of Saudi Arabia
It seems curious to me that many of the people who were pouring scorn on the US insistence that it was fighting a ‘war’ against Al Qaeda, rather than just treating September 11th as a criminal matter, are the same people now howling about treatment of captive Al Qaeda fighters. So let me get this straight: this is not a war but these pundits want the captives to be treated according to the Geneva Convention?
Interesting. Next time I get pulled over for speeding, I will refuse to pay the ticket on the grounds I was not treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. That should work.
Also I saw one talking head after another on the television tonight, usually ‘Professors of Middle Eastern Studies’ that I have never heard of before, declaiming that “this treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners is going to ‘inflame the Arab street’ like never before!”. Ah, the good old ‘Arab Street’ again. Earth calling all ‘Professors of Middle Eastern Studies’: no one in the Western world who actually matters gives a damn about the mythical ‘Arab street’. Perhaps these ‘Professors’ need to take a sabbatical and do some ‘American Studies’ before they get in front of a camera and have the opposite effect on US opinion they were probably hoping for.
When the average westerner (i.e. not Robert Fisk) hears these people’s warnings followed by a clip of a street full of chanting Arab and burning American flags, what is going through their heads is not “Oh… we’d better get Alan Dershowitz out to Guantanamo Bay pronto to represent those poor Al Qaeda guys.” No, they are thinking “Gee, I wonder how many of those fuckers in that ‘Arab street’ I’m looking at on the TV a single cluster bomb would take out if dropped right about…now.”
While enthralled in an argument over God with one of my philosophy teachers, we hit upon an interesting subject that severely challenged my beliefs about the world. That subject was the question: are we determined by God to do things, or do we have the power of free will via spontaneous order.
The teacher’s assertion was that we are determined by God to do whatever God wants us to do. He further declared that the silly idea of individuality and the other silly idea of natural laws were a bunch of bunk that Thomas Jefferson (among many others) abused to gain power. These natural laws and notions that the individual was sovereign believed that spontaneous order works. Let me divert from the post for a moment and argue against two things here:
1) I believe that there are natural laws. In the state of nature, with no forms of civilization or order (including religion, government, and other oppressors) around, we would behave by these fundamental natural laws, without question, because they are natural. By nature, for example, we have the ability to operate individually for our personal good. That good involves saying what we think, owning property, having the ability to defend ourselves, and, among many others, having the ability to live. If those natural rights sound familiar, that is only because they are defended by the Bill of Rights. Libertarianism, I contend, revolves heavily around the idea of natural rights or natural laws. Without them, there is no justification for claiming that the individual is sovereign, which, need I say, libertarianism does.
2) Spontaneous order is what guides the world, not some cockeyed notion of God’s will determining us from birth to death. By nature things happen which force us to adjust and change our beliefs about the world. This is seen daily in capitalism, because of the innovation that is constantly undergone to correct past problems. I contend that people innovate and change without being determined to do so. But as my teacher would say, do we really know anything?
Let me stop with my philosophical diatribes that seem to be more prominent on Sunday morning than other times (those dang religious shows) and turn now to the question of what does this have to with liberal bias on campus. Just wait!
The teacher, as I stated, declared that every course of action was chosen by God. God had determined John Locke and others to invent the notion that in the state of nature, there are natural laws. This was to trick humans to think that God did not exist, hence the rise in the 18th and 19th centuries of deistic and atheistic notions; which God had determined.
He continued to say that in the 20th century God showed his power by causing the Great Depression (he determined the stock market to crash), to force religion back into our lives. Then he determined us to call for big government as a sign of religion; big government was a new age pyramid for God, if you will. I am not making this up!
Now here is how I look at it: I am a deist: there are laws in the universe that are not intruded upon by God. Second, I believe, as stated, in natural laws. Third, I believe that natural laws clearly defy the growth of government; and seeming that God does not supervise or enforce those natural laws, God does not support big government either.
Regardless if you agree with me or not on my religious views, I think most of us (I hope) can agree that God does not support big government. However, if you listened to the teacher one might think that FDR was God’s second son. (That would make Daschle…)
But wait, it gets better. I asked him to explain the infidels who do not support big government? His answer: the devil put them on this earth to torment God, and so far God is winning showing his strength with every new government program. So, to my fellow devil worshiping libertarians, advocate evil by advocating limited government.
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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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