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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Exactly a year before the assasination attempt on President Chirac the day before yesterday, I stood in a downpour at the corner of the avenue de Friedland on the place de l’Etoile at the top of the Champs Elysees. The exact spot of yesterday’s gunman in fact.
I picked the spot because it was at the top of the Champs Elysees where the parade vehicles sort themselves out. Because of the wet conditions and the roundabout of l’Etoile, the vehicles have to drive slowly, giving me a better view.
As the military parade began President Chirac was driven slowly, in an open topped vehicle which dropped speed even more to negotiate the bend before entering the Champs Elysees. M. Chirac is tall (well over six foot), towering over his bodyguard, he doesn’t wear a hat or cap, and as his convoy meandered past I remarked to myself that with a heavy calibre pistol any shooter would have fancied their chances of hitting M. Chirac several times at a distance of of about ten metres. I myself, never having fired any weapon, would probably have managed to miss.
Over the next couple of days I mentioned this to several French libertarians.
One can imagine my relief to discover that the gunman was a member of a white supremacist organisation which has no links to the French libertarian movement.
I would like to be able to assert with confidence that no libertarian in France would believe that assasinating Chirac would do no good. They are pretty cynical about the merits one politician versus another.
Unfortunately, Chirac is such a dreadfully corrupt character (financially, morally, intellectually) that I can’t think of anyone from his circles who wouldn’t be an improvement. I wouldn’t be able to put them off by saying “So and so could get in and he’d be worse…” So maybe it could have been one of ours. However, to quote the Jackal: “You see, gentlemen, your own efforts have not only failed but have queered the pitch for everyone else.”
Oh well, with any luck he’ll catch pneumonia next time there’s a downpour.
Paul Staines thinks Alan Greenspan as a canny operator who requires some careful interpretation
Yep, the 80s are over, Gordon Gekko is dead and buried, Gordon Brown lives, the stock market is going to the Antarctic, CEOs are going to jail and now the high priest of central banking himself says greed got out of control in the 90s.
I admit to never understanding why Disney’s Eisner would be motivated to work Mickey Mouse harder if he had $300m in stock options instead of $100m, but hey, I thought it was up to the shareholders to decide rather than the readers of the New York Times. Enron was pretty bad, the accountants seem to have been looking the other way and the CEOs were acting like robber barons of yore.
Today the Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was giving his biannual testimony to congress. Markets stop and listen, particularly when they are in trouble – and boy are they trouble today – I had CNBC (“bubblevision”) playing him live whilst trying to figure out how not to lose money, I heard him say “the latter part of the 1990s … arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice. An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community..”
Guilty as charged. For a period in 1999 to 2001 whilst the NASDAQ got gloriously irrationally exuberant, I was completely infected with greed, my altruistic immunity system shutdown. Hot dot.com IPOs? “Gimme, gimme, gimme” I cried. “Yahoo! Lets go Cisco!” I wasn’t the only one, an old friend is currently staying with me. He is a private banker, he grew his family’s nest egg 2000% in four years, then wiped it out in one year. His wife is suing him, not for divorce, but for misadvising her in his capacity as her broker. (Memo to self, never marry an American lawyer).
Greenspan has been very clever in his testimony, he has defended capitalism whilst decrying capitalists and their avarice. He basically said the bull market gold rush of the 90s overwhelmed the checks and balances of American capitalism, but capitalism is good, just some capitalists are bad. I could further summarize what he said but why not click to the Fed’s own page for yourself?
Oh, one of the big insurance companies has just announced that it “is not a forced seller of equities”. Hmmm.
Paul Staines
Patrick Crozier sees that the railways are not immune to the same laws of supply and demand as everyone else
The news that the government is considering removing rail fare controls has, in media parlance “raised fears” of a massive increase in prices.
For once the fear is the right word. Allowing railway companies the freedom to set their own fares does seem scary. The man waiting for the 08:22 has to get to work. For him there is, to all intents and purposes, only one way of getting to work – the train. There is no choice. Buying railway tickets is not like buying bars of chocolate.
So, there must be controls, right? Wrong. Fare controls are amongst the most damaging forms of regulation that governments can impose on a railway. Here, there were very few controls and very few complaints until the 1920s. London and its railways expanded in tandem bringing suburbia to the masses, all at an affordable price. In the 1920s the state imposed controls on freight charges. Railway profits went for a Burton. Then, during the Second World War, the government froze fares while inflation let rip. The railways emerged in a parlous state, in dire need of a major overhaul. During nationalisation fares were constantly being held down while the industry gradually declined. It is significant, that British Rail’s happiest time was during the 1980s when it was allowed to increase fares more or less at will. Incidentally, the chief reason why Japanese trains are so overcrowded is, once again, state-imposed fare control.
But what of the man on the 08:22? What’s going to happen to him when he’s left to the tender mercies of the market? Well, the bad news is that, intitially at least, his fares are going to go up. Quite a lot in fact.
The interesting thing is what happens next. If fares are high and are kept high and passengers see no improvement in service they will start to make different arrangements. Some will move to somehere near a cheaper railway. Others will change jobs to somewhere nearer where they live. Slowly but surely the railway will start to lose revenue.
At this point the market starts to come into its own. Sure, some railways will exhibit a couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude, put up the fares, keep them high and do nothing in return but their profits will decline. But others will take an entirely different approach. They will use the price signal to improve quantity and quality. They will introduce lower fares for those travelling before the peak. They will introduce automatic fare reductions in cases of poor punctuality. They will increase capacity and they will spruce up stations (where they don’t rebuild them). They will do this because higher fares will tell them that there is a market out there waiting to be satisfied and satisfied markets mean nice, fat pay cheques.
When fares are set free the man on the 08:22 will see a step change in the quality of the service. It won’t happen at once (railways are not like that) and it won’t be without pain, but it will happen.
This is just to get the hang of the new blogging procedures, which Perry is demonstrating to me right here, right now.
But this is a great story, from yesterday’s Times (T2 – Monday July 15 – sorry, The Times is unlinkable these days). It turns out that all the medical advice we’ve all been deluged with over the last half century about not eating fatty foods could be the reason why so many people have recently become so very, very fat. It works like this. Fat doesn’t make you all that fat, but it does make you feel full. As a result, if you don’t eat any fat, you don’t feel full, and you do eat more of the stuff (carbohydrates etc.) that do make you fat. Ergo … Classic.
I was reading Aeroplane over what might charitably be called “lunch”. Some crisps and a cup at the approximate time of a normal lunch… but this is just making a short story long.
Castle Bromwich is well known in aviation circles. It’s where a large number of Spitfires and Lancasters were built (for the non-aviation minded, that places it in World War II). Each airplane had to be taken up and run through some rough testing before being handed over to the ATA (the men and women who delivered aircraft to the RAF bases). The test pilots were there to ensure manufactruing mistakes were found at the plant and not in battle.
Now Castle Bromwich had miserable weather, lots of fog, a rather short runway that was half paved and half grass. I remembered reading much of that before. What I didn’t know was the interesting bit about the approach. You see, there was a sewage treatment plant just before the threshold.
It really has to be asked. Did the test pilots at Castle Bromwich originate the phrase…. “landing us in the shit”???
I couldn’t resist it.
57 years ago today a mushroom bloomed in the desert at Alamorgordo, New Mexico.
That was a very long time ago. It’s almost high school science project level technology today.
From a point in the far future the 21st century may well be seen as the beginning of the end of dense “target rich” population centers.
 
Samizdata.net is our new look blog that replaces the blogspot hosted/blogger.com powered Libertarian Samizdata. We are now a Movable Type powered blog, fully searchable with thematic, author and date indexed archives.
It will take a while to fully index all our old archives but they are available indexed chronologically already.
Well, not really. But he does think life extension is inherently weird. But then I consider a preference for rotting as rather a run for the porcelain goddess philosophy…
The most important point to this disagreement is we can argue until the last trump (or the big crunch, or the heat death of the universe) and it need never be rancorous or threatening. As advocates of a free society neither of us believe we have a right to use force to make the other do things our way. Since I’m obviously right, and he’s wrong, if we were in a totalitarian society, I’d be using the government to stop him from pushing a cult of death and working to outlaw his desire to shove loved ones into the ground to rot or stick them in an oven to be rendered into a fine ash to be kept in an urn on the mantle. I’d have him forceably stuck into a state-mandated state-regulated state-subsidized liquid Nitrogen suspension no matter what his pre-expressed beliefs were. All for his own good of course.
Since we don’t live in that sort of slave world (well, not quite) he has no need to worry… and neither do I. We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to criminalize each other. We can just disagree and get on with living our lives as we see fit.
That is the glory of Liberty.
I met up with Tim and Helen Evans yesterday. After several years at the Independent Healthcare Association, Tim is now the President of the Centre for the New Europe, which is pro-free-market but neutral about whether the EU as such is a good thing, which, when Britain is finally and irrevocably swallowed up by what Freedom and Whisky calls the Holy Belgian Empire, is what I will probably end up being. Tim is now connecting with lots of excellent European libertarians, including a lot of well placed academics. How come continental Europe’s libertarians are so excellent? Simple. They have to be.
Tim also reminded me of an email I received a few weeks back from his CNE colleague Richard Miniter, following a plug I put here for two forthcoming books by him. Apparently a long lost friend of Richard’s saw my mention of him and got back in touch, much to Richard’s delight. I asked Richard if I could mention this also – Samizdata brings people together again, etc., etc. – and he said yes fine. After all, if you’re someone like Richard, getting your books plugged is easy enough. Keeping in touch with all your cool friends is harder, and he was genuinely grateful. But then I forgot about this. Meeting Tim again is my excuse to mention this touching reunion now. Said Rich:
The friend, Steve Bodio, wrote a excellent piece for the Atlantic Monthly last year entitled “the eagle hunters of Mongolia.” He spent some time with those fiercely independent steppe riders and watched them bring home dinner with their trained eagles. He is also a gun expert and genuine authority on birds. And, of course, he loves freedom and despises “priggish authority” in all its forms.
People who habitually watch birds in countries other than their own are as likely as not spooks of some kind, in my opinion. After all, what better way is there to spy on metal birds and their habitats, and such like, than to pretend to be looking only at regular ones? And this bird man is also a gun man. Add the fact that one of Richard’s forthcoming books is about Bill Clinton’s (mis)handling of al-Qaeda and is apparently full of juicy revelations, and you get the picture. These guys may not have spook ranks and spook serial numbers, but they definitely have good friends who do.
Some libertarians say that we should never make any friends among the spooks, even the part-time ones, all of whom are the statist spawn of Satan. What tripe. For starters, not all of these people advertise themselves as flamboyantly as some of them do, so how can we know who to avoid? And more seriously, they (or their for-real friends and contacts) work at the darkest heart of the state and spy on the rest of it, and they know how it really works, and doesn’t work. They know that the state is an anarchy, and they are mostly individualist anarchists themselves, in their everyday working lives if not in their beliefs. So if we’re right about what the state is really like – and we are right, right? – then the spooks should be moving our way. The question the spooks mostly ask me is not: Are you sure that the state is really that crazy? It’s: How could a totally free market in spookery actually be made to work, given that it’s such a nice idea? (I’m working on it.)
Think what would happen to the course of history if all the spooks and semi-spooks (or even a decent percentage of them) did become hard-core libertarians.
These idle disputants overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valour.
– Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 30
Here’s an interesting thing. I was surprised to receive an e-mail from John Braue of Rat’s Nest, asking whether I had sent him an e-mail headed “Fw:darling” with no text but two attachments.
I had not.
I tried to post a virus warning on my blog, but Blogger wouldn’t let me. My Blogger troubles aren’t the interesting part though. This is: Dawson kindly posted a warning on my behalf and added that he had had similar fake e-mails purporting to come from other bloggers, including himself. Now, am I wrong, or does that suggest not the random spatter-gun malice of most viruses but a individually-targeted campaign to diminish trust within a community, namely ours?
By the way, it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good: I have now discovered the Rat’s Nest: a splendidly outspoken blog. And, apropos of Brian’s post next but one down, the latest blogger blug that takes you to the wrong link is not unique to UK Transport. It’s hit me, and several others too.
UPDATE: I have been advised that my virus was probably something called “the Klez worm” or simply “Klez.”
The Daily Telegraph reports today that a farmer who was accused of shooting intruders at his home has been acquitted. Frederick Hemstock, who had claimed he intended to fire the gun in the air to frighten two intruders, has been cleared of deliberately shooting one of them.
The judge in the case also criticised the police for refusing to answer an emergency call made by the defendant’s wife. Why is anyone surprised? Dialing 999 is now the equivalent of playing the National Lottery.
Of course, if Mr. Hemstock had deliberately shot the intruder, then he still would not have been guilty in my eyes if he could have been shown to prove self-defence. But as we sadly know, self-defence is the Number One crime in this country. Meanwhile, PC Plod has all those speeding CCTV cameras to attend to…
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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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